I should add a little note here about the peculiarities of owning and registering a motor vehicle in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, because boy howdy, it has some.

I first encountered this when I got my grandparents' old Grand Prix. I had never bothered registering Gojira in Massachusetts; in fact, now that I think about it, I suspect Dad and I never bothered to do a transfer of ownership on it, and it was just on his plates the whole time I had it down there. That was trusting of him...

Anyway, when my grandparents gave me the Grand Prix, that wasn't an option, so I took the old Maine registration, my proof of insurance, and whatnot and trundled on down to the Registry of Motor Vehicles office in Worcester to see to it.

The first snag we hit was when the lady finished looking through the papers I'd given her and said, "There's nothing here to calculate sales tax from."

"What sales tax?" I said.

"You have to pay sales tax on automobile purchases in this state," she said, as if explaining something simple to a very slow child. Holding up Gram's "I hereby give my 1987 Pontiac..." note, she went on, "This bill of sale doesn't say how much you paid for the car."

"I didn't pay anything for it, my grandmother gave it to me," I said.

RMV Lady shook her head severely. "You can't receive a car as a gift," she said. "There has to be a way of attributing the value of the transaction for purposes of taxation."

"So... Massachusetts wants to tax me on the moral value of being given an old car by my grandmother?"

"If you want to view it that way."

"... What if I paid her a dollar for it?"

She gave me a look like, Now you're getting the picture, backwoods boy, and said primly, "That would do."

So I amended the note to include "for the sum of $1" and paid, I think, seven cents' sales tax on the purchase to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and all was well.

A year later, I encountered a different and altogether more vexing oddity of the system, when the time came to trade the one-dollar Pontiac in on the Neon. Because here's the thing about the Massachusetts RMV: They don't do temporary license plates. At all.

In most U.S. states of my experience, when you buy a car from a dealership, the dealer puts a paper license plate on it, and you have a while to get around to going to the town office or the DMV or wherever and properly registering the car. (When I was a kid, it was 10 days in Maine; I think it's two weeks now, but everybody still calls them 10-day plates because that's how we roll up here. Seriously, we give directions based on where things used to be. "Turn left at where the Buick dealership was...")

Well, not in Massachusetts, no sir. You buy a car in Massachusetts, it leaves the lot with real grown-up license plates on it, or not at all. (Well, I assume you could have it towed or taken off on a flatbed, but, I mean, who does that?)

For some of the bigger or higher-end dealerships, all this means is that the sale paperwork takes even longer than normal, because those dealerships have RMV offices built in, and they can take care of all that for you while you cool your heels in the salesman's cubicle, resisting the upsells for tire insurance and aftermarket rustproofing and stuff. That's how it worked when I bought the Saab I used to have; Charles River Saab wasn't a big dealership, but it was fairly upscale. I might've been the plebbest customer they ever had there.

The Dodge dealer I got the Neon from, though, didn't have that. Instead, the rule for places like that was that you had to wait while the dealership sent an employee to the RMV to register your car for you. This tends to take many hours—the already-very-long time it takes to do anything at the RMV, plus however long it took the guy to drive over there and back. It's ridiculous.

On the day I bought the Neon, it was even more ridiculous, because the guy who normally did that at Harr Dodge was out sick that day, and they couldn't find anyone else who wasn't too busy to do it. They tried to get me to come back the next day, but they had already taken the Pontiac away, so what the hell was I supposed to do, walk home? I argued with the salesman about it for a bit—at one point I got so disgusted with the whole affair that I told him to give me my Pontiac back and we'd forget the whole damn thing—and eventually he agreed to a Cunning Plan, to wit:

He would throw a test-drive plate on the junkiest car on the lot, and I would drive over the RMV and pretend to be a dealership employee in order to register my own car. I would then return the junkiest car to the lot, get into to the hopefully-not-junkiest car on the lot, to which the service department would have affixed the Pontiac's old plates while I was gone, and we'd all get on with our lives.

And it worked! I went in and put the papers on the counter all, "Hey, (mumble) from Harr Dodge, got a customer registration for ya." I don't think the RMV dude ever even looked at me.

I think I've just admitted to three different motor vehicle registration irregularities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. As with my high-speed adventure in the Camaro in 1991, I can only hope that the statute of limitations has run out.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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