So I can drive legally again. You’ll love this story.

In 2006 – long before I met Kristi – I was living in an apartment in Winter Park, Florida. Once upon a time, Winter Park was considered a fairly well-to-do, upper middle class neighborhood. That changed for the most part during the housing boom of the last decade; as someone I knew once told me, the rich people sold their homes to very heavily mortgaged people. End result was more people, more noise, more crime.

At the time, I was a bad insomniac. I’d work until about 3am, go to bed, sleep until 11am, rinse and repeat. It worked okay because at the time, most of my clients were on the West Coast, so I just joked about living on West Coast time. I’d be out walking around the apartment complex at 2am, trying to unwind. Occasionally I’d jump in my little Toyota Camry and drive up to the UPS Store and check my mailbox at midnight. Traffic in Orlando is horrendous, bumper to bumper everywhere, at all times except late at night.

So one night I’m driving back from the mailbox through Winter Park, around midnight, and cop lights come on behind me. I had a taillight out. He gave me a fix-it ticket and sent me on my way.

Ten minutes later, was pulled over again by a different Winter Park cop, this time (allegedly) because my license plate light was out.

Two blocks later, pulled a third time, this time for the tail light again. That cop let me go after I explained that I was just trying to drive two miles through Winter Park to get home, and had already been pulled over twice in fifteen minutes. Irritated, I showed him ticket #1. He explained that they were getting a lot of pressure to crack down on crime late at night, so basically they were pulling over anyone who looked suspicious. In other words, I was being ticketed for driving an old Toyota through Winter Park at night.

So. Fixed the car, got my fix-it tickets stamped, was told that no points would be assessed on my Florida license. This was at the very start of 2007.

Fast forward two years. Since that night, I’d met the love of my life, moved to California, gotten married, every single aspect of my life had dramatically changed. Nothing I could have foreseen that night in late 2006. One day we get a notice from the car insurance people that our premium was going to shortly triple. At the time, we were broke and Kristi’s job was in jeopardy and my clients were drying up and now these guys wanted us to pay a fortune for car insurance. In a panic, we called our agent and were told that the state of California had assessed three points on my drivers license. The agent announced this in a tone that suggested that I was a DUI who recently ran over a class of handicapped children.

So, we contacted the California DMV to find out what’s what, assuming there was a clerical error of some kind. We were told that the records had transferred from Florida, and the state of Florida had me listed with several moving violations from late 2006. We told California that those were fix-it tickets, and they’d been fixed, and there were no points on my Florida license. California told us that it would have to be sorted on the Florida end.

Florida insisted that I had no points on my license and that it would have to be sorted on the California end.

It was a nightmare. We worked our way through one obscure bureaucratic cubbyhole after another, each one insisting that it was someone else’s problem. No progress made at all. If we couldn’t get this worked out, I would have to come off the insurance and I wouldn’t be able to drive legally in California until early 2010, when the points rolled off.

Eventually what we learned was this. In both California and Florida, fix-it tickets don’t turn into points unless you don’t get the car fixed. In California, fixing the car results in the ticket being expunged from your record. In Florida, however, they leave the ticket on the record, flag it as “adjudicated” (which meant, legally, that I pled guilty) and simply not assess points. So, when my files transferred from Florida to California, they included three “adjudicated” tickets, which California promptly assessed points for. We were told by California that the only way to fix the problem was to have Florida change their computer systems and how they flagged such ticket situations.

So here’s how it was. I had fixed fix-it tickets. No Florida points. Had the exact same thing, under the exact same circumstances, happened in any California jurisdiction, I would have had no California points. But since it happened in Florida, even though Florida considered it a nonissue, California was going to treat me like a three-time DUI. EVEN THOUGH IT WOULD HAVE BEEN A NONISSUE HAD IT HAPPENED HERE.

We had no choice. Off I came from the insurance, banished from legal driving for at least another year.

All basically because I once got pulled over several times, in a single trip, by overeager cops, for driving a Toyota through Winter Park late at night.

I’m saying this now because today I’m finally back on the insurance. Points gone. Lately we’ve been paying off credit cards, catching up, building business, and at the moment we’re the most financially solvent we’ve been in over two years. It’s a really good feeling. And to top it all off, I can drive again.

Moral of the story: if you happen to find yourself driving through Winter Park, Florida late at night, in a car worth less than fifty grand, just pull over somewhere quiet and wait for dawn. You never know where life will take you in a few short years. Your legal indiscretions, innocent as they may seem at the time, can have consequences that follow you longer than they should.

Or just drive a Mercedes. No one’s ever suspicious driving a Mercedes.

Actually seen last night while we were out late after dinner.

The recession’s been tough and small business has had to improvise. And I’m sure they’re the only spot in Modesto that even thought to go after the mailbox/dry cleaning crossover market. Ten years from now, when positively everyone is doing it, remember that you saw it here first: brave, bold, entrepreneurial innovation at its finest.

Mr. Strip Mall International Shipping Dry Cleaning Tailor Mailbox Guy, we salute you!