I mailed in a set of license plates to NY State's Department of Motor Vehicles. They were for the car I gifted to my son when he moved down to Arkansas. he registered the car in his name down there. Anyway, NYS DMV amazingly entered the info on my surrendered license plates into their computer system within three days of receipt if not sooner. That is a good thing, it keeps me from being penalized for dropping the insurance on my car. After getting that done, in what was apparently record speed for NYS DMV, they went right back to their old standard of being as slow as molasses running up hill on an icy cold day. You see, because I turned in my plates while still having just over a year remaining in the two year registration period, they are going to send me a partial refund of the registration fee. I believe it to be one half of the fee minus one dollar. While that is nice, the thing is that as best I can figure, the paying the refund is going to take them about 16 weeks. When I checked on the status of my plates, it said there would be a refund but that the amount o the refund would not be calculated until June 6th at the earliest. That is exactly eight weeks from the day they received my plates. Then it said to expect payment 8 weeks after that which would make it September 1st. Hell, I received my NY State tax returns in less than two months and while that seemed like a miracle it is easy to see that NYS DMV is as slow as ever in some of its business. It used to be that if you had to go to DMV for anything, in the office that was closest to where I lived at the time, it would take a minimum of 3 to 4 hours and then you were often told you had to do yet something else and wait another hour or more on another line; nowadays the wait has been cut to about 2 hours at most at the DMV I currently use and sometimes less than an hour. That is not as bad as before but still is a long wait especially since you have to go there during normal weekday business hours to get anything done as they are not open after 4PM or on weekends. My last visit to get my most recent license has me there for well over an hour. I imagine the good thing in them being slow is that when I finally receive the refund from them it will come as a surprise because I am sure to forget about it by then.
On another note, I just registered my other car because the registration was going to expire on May15th. Since the DMV kept sending me email notices about it, I figured I would get it done early. I also figured it would be good to get it done early in the event something went wrong. So, I did that online last night. Doing it was quick and easy. Yes NYS DMV has improved in many ways over the years, especially by computerizing many of the processes even though they can be as slows as ever as seen above. They say I should get my new registration within 10 days but if not they were kind enough to email me a temporary registration that I could use. The thing about the temporary registration is that it was effective yesterday April 15th and it expires in ten days of April 25th. My current registration does not expire until May 15th! Did I happen to mention that besides sometimes being notoriously slow at what they do, some of the folks at NYS DMV are mindless morons. Whoever thought up that system of dating the temporary registrations to expire before the expiration of the current registration has a definite short circuit in his thought process. Makes me wonder if anyone used any brain power at all in thinking up that system.
I suppose, if that is all I have to worry about, then maybe I should consider it a good thing. Chances are though, the next thing I will know is that my new registration will not have arrived in a timely fashion or that I will start being charged a penalty for not having insurance on the car for which I surrendered the plates. Time will tell.
All the best,
Glenn B