Joined: 01-06-2007
Comments:
Northbridge
Posted: ages ago
How many of us have ever received parking tickets? Well one guy certainly acquired more than his fair share in unusual circumstances. <p>In 1979, Robert Barbour of Los Angeles, decided he wanted to stand out from the crowd with a set of personalised number plates. Heavily into sailing, he was asked for 3 choices on the form for the plates. "SAILING" and "BOATING" were his only two choices, so he wrote down "No PLATE" in the 3rd option, meaning that if he couldn't have either of the first two, that he didn't want a personalised license plate at all.<br />The Department of Motor Vehicles misunderstood the "NO PLATE" request and issued his with a license plate bearing that exact wording. Obviously Robert wasn't happy, but the plates were still unique and so he kept them.</p><p>By the time a month had passed, a steady stream of parking tickets began arriving. Over 2,500 parking tickets were sent to his address from all over the state.</p><p>The reason? Every time a car was booked without a license plate affixed, the officer would write down "NO PLATE".</p><p>It took quite a few years and many court appearances for the DMV to fix the problem by finally instructing officers to write down "NONE" in the license plate field of the parking ticket, and eventually the steady stream dwindled down to a trickle</p>