Monday, January 31, 2005
(2:07 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Should I sell my truck?
I'm getting really discouraged by the trouble I've had over my truck lately. It runs perfectly, but apparently it is an unpopular vehicle in government circles. Doing some research into one of the two parking tickets I received Thursday, I discovered that one of them is for the offense of having parked my truck on a residential street. Apparently in certain wards of Chicago, they recognize the fact that people sometimes use a truck for their primary vehicle and do not ticket those trucks. Apparently I don't live in one of those wards.I would also add that the City Sticker costs twice as much for a truck -- even, apparently, the smallest truck of them all -- and the only way to avoid getting assessed a late fee is to bring in a copy of a lease, when we don't have a formal lease. That is also the only acceptable evidence for me to contest the ticket that I received on Thursday for not having the City Sticker.
All of this trouble follows a long string of fraudulent tickets I've received from the Illinois Tollway for toll violations I couldn't possibly have committed in areas that I've never been. My explanation: the idiots in the Secretary of State office don't "retire" license plate numbers when they expire; instead, they immediately issue them to someone else. In January 2004, I was apparently issued the same number as someone whose I-Pass transponder wasn't working for most of 2003 and who -- in an incident that brings joy to my heart -- also didn't promptly renew his registration, which meant that he was driving around on my plate number through February 2004, resulting in some tickets that I couldn't actually prove were not mine. Although I managed to get the many, many 2003 tickets cleared up, the 2004 tickets were a bigger problem. I talked to a lawyer about the situation, but he didn't do shit, so I ended up just paying the $100 so that they wouldn't raise the fine to $350, send me to collections, and suspend my license. If there is any justice in this world, the other guy has renewed his plates and been assigned the numbers of someone else who has an I-Pass problem.
So the question is as follows: Is my truck cursed? If so, is the curse livable compared to a curse that would entail physical problems with the truck? Would it be morally acceptable for me to pass such a curse onto another private individual (from whom I could get $6800, according to the Blue Book)? Would the moral issue disappear were I to pass the the curse onto a used car dealer (from whom I could expect a mere $5000)? Or is it sufficiently ridiculous that a poor, unemployed grad student is driving around a truck that could command such a price, such that any misfortune that befalls me is karmically appropriate? Is my ire disproportionate, and if so, is it the result of my having read too much Kafka as a teenager?
(My ownership of this truck stems from a fortunate confluence of some car troubles with my previous, appropriately shitty car and my grandma's unexpectedly coming into a little money, with which she bought me the S-10, the cheapest new car she could find, basically on impulse -- meaning that I have already had my share of the inheritance.)
