Jack makes it in time again – hooray!

There we were on Friday evening, relaxing and recovering from the week’s travails watching some telly.

We had survived buying the new car, getting our Scottish bank account unlocked, and a nasty bout of convincing the Scottish Teachers Pension Association that I was, in fact, still alive and entitled to draw my pay. Nothing else could possibly go wrong – –

That’s when two uniformed police officers walked up on our lawn and peered through our window!

To show that they came in peace one of them held up a couple of car license plates and gave a friendly smile.

They were our car’s old license plates…..

Wendy invited them, the older one still holding the plates out like a shield. They stood in their black uniforms covered in badges and equipment, including guns, looking uncomfortable in our front room.

I looked at the plates and realized they were old, battered and dirty and the paint was flaking off them. I remembered that about two years ago I had gone through the maze of the DMV to get new ones; these were even now sitting in our new car waiting to be fitted. Were we in some kind of trouble? We’d only had the new car a few days!

No, in fact, the officers were as befuddled as we were. The plates they held had been found seven miles away in the yard of a nice old lady who called the police to see what was up. The police ran them, found us, and here they stood, looking ill at ease, leaning against our living room walls.

We have no idea how they got there or who had put them there and neither did the policemen. One of the officers was tall and obviously in charge while the other was clearly somewhat bemused and embarrassed by the whole affair. If there had been a balloon above his head, it would have said something to the effect of, “This is not what I signed up for. This is silly. Let me out of here unless I’m going to get to arrest somebody.”

The older officer suggested that probably we had thrown the plates away, someone had been garbage surfing, found them and sold them to someone with an unregistered car. Then they dumped them a few years later.

So, the long and short of it is that you should always be careful how you dispose of old vehicle plates – you never know where they could land up, or who could come knocking on your door to return them.