One of my previous entires in this mediocre blog of mine was expressing my discontent having been pulled over going only four mph over the speed limit. Because of that incident, I sat through a six hour defensive driving course.

Having successfully completed the course about a month ago, I patiently waited for my certificate of completion to arrive. A few weeks later, and it still hadn’t shown up in my mailbox! The certificate was sent off from a town several hours away, there was no reason for it to take this long! I called up the company to express my concern with the tardiness of my certificate, and the quickly approaching deadline which I needed to file it.

After a short conversation, we figured out what happened. Apparently I misspelled the name of my home town, and the certificate was probably lost in the mail because of it. I found it somewhat odd that I had “misspelled” my home town address, especially since my bank’s card isn’t billed if something like my address is even slightly wrong. Oh well, whatever.

As the man on the other end of the phone arranged to have another certificate printed and shipped to me, he asked me to verify my name. After spelling it out to him he tells me “I” must have misspelled my name on the online form as well. Wow, not just one typo, but now two typos?

After finding this many mistakes in my record, we went over all the little bits of information…guess what? Another typo!!
Seems as if “I” misspelled the judge’s name, and even the county he presides in. I’m usually the first person to admit when I’m wrong, but this many typos and incorrect information just couldn’t have been my fault.

After all the information was verified, another certificate was made and shipped out over night, or so I thought. Apparently certificates can only be printed before 3pm, and our verification of the data had carried on well after 3pm. So now, my certificate would show up 1 day after the damn thing was due…lovely.

Having shipped all the paper work via express mail to the next town over one day late, I received a letter for the judge. The letter read somewhat like this,”Dear reader, the honorable judge demands his money!” So all this, was a was of my time and money. How I hate the court system in our country…had I a couple extra million dollars, I’m sure I could of found a way around this and never had to have worried about a stupid ticket in a small rural town.

This adds two things on my “Hate List”, the Texas Dept. of Transportation and the honorable judge of the next town over.

Technorati Tags: Defensive Driving, Honorable Judge, Speeding Ticket