Keystone State Thread

I'm also curious to know if this has happened to anybody; I've personally never had this problem because I've had the same insurance company since I got my driver's license. My dad never missed an insurance payment, and once I started paying my own insurance, I never did either.

A friend and former coworker of mine had a 2011 Chevy Silverado, and he switched insurance companies. The truck was never uninsured, but Pennsylvania's glitchy computer system registered an insurance lapse. My friend never knew about this until he got pulled over for driving on a suspended registration, the registration having been suspended due to a perceived lapse in insurance. The truck was in fact insured, and it was also inspected, so the cops didn't tow it and allowed him to drive it home. Unfortunately, they did confiscate the license plate.

** I respect the police, and I also keep everything on my truck up to date and don't have any plans to switch insurance companies, so the likelihood of this happening is virtually zero. However, everyone on TW knows that I have autism and am very attached to my truck. I would likely end up with a citation for disorderly conduct at the very minimum if a cop tried to remove something from MY TRUCK without my permission. That said, once again I do not see anything like this happening because everything on my truck is in legal. **

** I will admit that I got pulled over one time a few months after I replaced my standard PA plate with the specialty railroad plate that I presently have; I handed the cop the registration slip for the old plate and he said it was for the wrong vehicle. Luckily, I had the new registration slip as well and it ended up not being an issue. **

Anyway, so my buddy lost his license plate but was able to drive the Silverado home because it was inspected and he proved the truck was insured. He also owned an old single-axle dump truck, but the Silverado was his only normal-sized vehicle and he had to get to work, so he took the valid plate off of the dump truck and put it on the Silverado.

Amazingly enough, he drove around with the other plate on his truck until he got the registration situation worked out with PennDOT, and didn't get pulled over.

 

The system's crazy. Counties like Beaver and Allegheny have emission testing, but Butler and Lawrence don't.

 

@shakerhood
@steelcity2
@Taco critter

This isn't the first person I know who got caught up in PennDOT's clerical clusterfucks. A former friend of mine let the insurance lapse on her 2004 Nissan Altima lapse because she couldn't afford it, and she got pulled over. Most of this fiasco was due to this girl's own stupidity. She lived in an apartment, but her driver's license still had the address of a house her parents had sold after they divorced.

I am not sure if driving without insurance is an automatic suspension upon conviction, or if her license got suspended because she was late paying the ticket. Anyway, her citation and the notice of suspension ended up in the mailbox of a house that her family no longer owned. She worked as an EMT for a private ambulance company, and during a routine annual background check, her boss and the owner of the company discovered that her license was suspended. He did not fire her, but obviously she wasn't allowed to drive the ambulances until she got things sorted out.

Her license expired while she was sorting it out, the day after her birthday in Novmeber 2015; I had no idea her license was actually suspended until March 2015. It was when I drove to her to a check cashing place, and they wouldn't cash her $500+ paycheck because her license was expired, that I found out her license was suspended.

By pure coincidence, the drugstore where she tried to cash her check was in the same shopping center as my bank. I am not rich, but I can't remember the last time I was completely broke, either. My friend was totally broke and living paycheck to paycheck, but I had a decent amount of money. It was only because this was an official check from a legit business (the ambulance company) that out of the kindness of my heart, I deposited her check into my account and gave her the cash right there.

That brings us to the issue of her license being suspended. It had been suspended in the fall of 2015, before it expired. In Pennsylvania, you get a renewal notice like three months before your license expires. You send a check back to PennDOT and they send you a "camera card" as well as a temporary license that's valid for like two months past the expiration of your actual license in case you can't get to the DMV right away. My friend's license, like the no insurance ticket and the suspension notice, was sent to her parents' old house...



I actually paid attention when reading the driver's handbook prior to getting my license, and being the autistic savant that I am, I retained much of that info; I knew for a fact that if somebody's driver's license was suspended in Pennsylvania for any reason, they had to mail it to PennDOT headquarters in Harrisburg, where it would be kept for the duration of the suspension period.

This is rather stupid in my opinion, and laughable that the bureaucrats in Harrisburg think that taking someone's physical license is going to stop them from driving if they really need to get somewhere or just don't give a shit about the law. I have never lost my license, but I drove on public roads a few times before I actually had one...



It was annoying for the people who actually followed the rules, because if they didn't have a passport or miltiary ID, they had to apply for non-driver ID card if they needed an ID to go about their lives. My friend was under the impression that the suspension had been lifted because it was supposed to be three months, and it had been way more than three months. She initially didn't believe me when I told her that she had to send it to Harrisburg, but she confirmed I was telling the truth, so she had to mail her expired license to Harrisburg and apply for a non-driver ID card. Her license was suspended in probably October 2015, and because of her general inneptness, she didn't get it back until June 2016. She was able to renew it without taking any tests, even though it had been expired for probably eight months.

That brings us to the PennDOT screwup. My friend had paid her fine, but PennDOT claimed to have never received it and refused to reinstate her driving privileges until she paid. Her dad ended up having to give the bureaucrats a piece of his mind, and her payment was mysteriously found a short time later.

 

@shakerhood
@steelcity2
@Taco critter

I am not going to share everything publicly, but I can divulge some things. This is a different girl than the one I was actually romantically involved with at the end of the summer in 2021.

So, the girl who got her license suspended for no insurance back in 2015 was living in the Poconos with four other people (her friend's fiance and his mom, the friend whose fiance it was, and this friend's friend who I actually did date briefly) by 2021. I won't sugarcoat things here...

In June 2021, I made plans with the girl who lost her license to meet up at a car show in Quakertown, and then bring her back to my house and hook up. She was broke and didn't have steady employment, so we reached an agreement which I am not particularly proud of at this point; I would use Venmo to front her gas money so she could drive down here and then back up to the mountains, and I would also buy her dinner, and I would get to sleep with her...

Life happens. She ended up in the hospital for some sort of foot infection and had to cancel at the last minute; I was very understanding, but the other guy's mom's Jeep had been repossessed and she had the only car among them. She actually had the nerve to ask me if I could send her the money anyway, so her loser roommates could use her car while she was in the hospital; I was pissed, but polite, and I told her that it wasn't my problem.

She didn't lose her license this time because she wasn't actually caught driving without insurance, but she was still making payments on her 2016 Chevy Sonic. This girl just couldn't hold a job for very long, and since she was unemployed she couldn't afford insurance, and let it lapse. When someone is still making payments on a vehicle, the lienholder requires them to have comprehensive insurance in case it gets totaled, so they don't lose their ass. The bank actually tracked her down in the mountains and sent the repo man to take the car. Since her dad cosigned on the car, and a repo would affect his credit, he paid a small fortune to get it back and also paid the insurance to make sure something like this didn't happen again. Real bunch of winners there...

I severed ties with her in September 2021 and haven't heard from her since.

 

Was it worth it?

 

Something similar happened to me back in the day, switched insurance and next thing I know a get a letter from the state asking for me to mail back my license plate ! Whoa hold the phone , after a couple of phone calls it was straightened out. But the state don't mess around.

 

Well, I didn't actually sleep with the girl who kept letting her insurance lapse; I do regret hooking up with the other girl from that group because has severe mental problems that didn't manifest themselves until after I started seeing her again.

The girl I actually did stuff with is the same girl who threw an empty Sunkist soda can out of my truck on a public road last August, and turned into a raging bitch when I understandably yelled at her for littering. I am not saying to be mean, but she is legimately so unintelligent that she couldn't understand why it was not okay to throw trash out the window of a moving vehicle. I have Weathertech floor liners and routinely toss empty bottles and cans on floor on the passenger side when on long drives; I would not have been upset if she tossed it on the floor, but she didn't want to hold the can, and in her infinite (lack of) wisdom she figured it was perfectly acceptable to toss the can out the window of my truck because "nobody was watching" (her exact words).

 

@steelcity2

Not everybody goes to my MegaThread in the "2nd Gen Builds forum", so I'll post this here...

Like me, this girl I hooked up with is on the autism spectrum, but she was diagnosed at a time when diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder and mental retardation could run concurrently. The DSM-5 calls both Down Syndrome and Mental Retardation "Intellectual Disabilities" in the interest of political correctness; I was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome in November 1998, when I was 9. Aspergers is on the hgiher end of the spectrum. Not even a decade ago, the powers that be decided to lump all autism spectrum disorders into one broad diagnosis of simply "autism". This pissed off me and several my friends who were also diagnosed with Aspergers in the 1980s and 1990s, when it was still an official diagnosis.

People have stereotypes about those who have mental retardation and other intellectual disibilities, like that they are nonverbal and can't drive, among other things. This girl got her driver's license before I did (though she is not as good a driver as I am), talks a lot and has a pretty good vocabulary, and has had a few jobs (though never for very long because she's such a difficult person). Even though she was diagnosed as being mildly mentally retarded as a child, she is capable of making decisions for herself.

This girl not only has autism and MR, but she has bipolar disorder, and the bipolar disorder is very poorly managed; I found out the hard way that her bipolar was very poorly managed when she reacted with incredible hostility to me yelling at her for throwing a soda can out of my truck! I am not saying this to be mean, but my theory is that she is legitimately unintelligent more than she is intellectually disabled. Being unintelligent or slow to pick up on things isn't a particularly big deal, but since she's bipolar and it is not well-managed, she has a tendency to become very angry when she's unable to figure something out.

 

I still remember when emission testing started in Allegheny County, what a pain in the ass. Glad to have no inspections here, as Charlie mentioned it's basically just a way to get $ from you.

 

And California is probably the worst state with regards to draconian emissions testing regulations...

 

I have a driver's license, I can drive a stick shift, I have an associate's degree, and I have a job with paid vacations and a 401K. If people know these things before I tell them that I'm on the autism spectrum, then they are occasionally shocked when I actually do tell that I am autistic.

 

I hear ya. I bet ur barely on the spectrum. You are a great example and wish others with Aspergers can see what you do and how you handle yourself. Maybe they can better themselves. Keep it up Charlie.

 

And one thing I've finally realized is that being in relationships with three girls on who are also on the spectrum, I probably don't want to get serious with such a girl unless she is at the same level or even higher functioning than I am. The first one was stereotypically autistic to the point of being obnoxious. For example, she was a know-it-all who thought she knew it better than you. Then, there was the time at my friend's birthday when he was serving sandwiches, and she openly complained that there wasn't pizza. At that same party, my other friend and his wife were there, and his wife was wearing nice clothes. She commented about how it was stupid for people to get all dressed up for casual gatherings, in earshot of my friend's take-no-bullshit Russian immigrant wife. The comment about the food and her dress led my friend's wife to question what I saw in her.

 

Based on some of the garbage driving around here.. some kind of basic safety inspection might not be the worst thing.. salt wrecks stuff during the winter and there’s no shortage of shitboxes

 

It's emissions testing that's the most obnoxious. My mechanic told me that as long as the catalytic converter is good and the CEL isn't on, it's basically a guaranteed pass...

 

I've got my own fart pipe, and I probably produce more emissions than my truck on a monthly basis...

 

Speedy recovery.

 

Speaking of fart pipes next time I see this vw jetta I gotta take a picture it's the literally dumbest thing I've ever seen. Looks like this picture. But dude has 2 pipes on each side that's looks just like this.

 

I seen it last week than again today. And that was the same reaction I had why but whyyyy