(OT) Rant - Department of Motor Vehicles and other absurdities

(I apologize if I already posted about this. Had some problems with
individual.net the other day. All this happened last Friday. It's a long
rant, and I apologize for that, too.)

/begin rant

My car tags & registration are coming up for renewal in April. It's
registered in Tennessee. (I still have an apartment there.) It occurred to
me I may as well go ahead and register it in SC. But my car title is locked
in a file cabinet in TN and I'd need it to register the car in SC.

So I called the DMV in Tennessee to request a duplicate title. The woman
was extremely rude. (I understand she's a harried and possibly underpaid
government employee, but hey! at least she has a job. Would it have killed
her to be polite?) She cut me off mid-sentence and informed me I can't
possibly have the title to my car because it still has a lien on it. I said
no, I paid the loan off in May, 2004. She came within a fraction of an inch
of calling me a liar. She said (snippily) I couldn't possibly have paid it
off because that's not what her computer shows.

We all know computers are never wrong, don't we? (GIGO - garbage in,
garbage out.) She asked "What bank do you send your payments to?" (Note:
she used the present tense, not past tense.) I sighed. I said I made my
last payment in 2004 and it was financed through the dealership, not my own
bank. I sent the payments to the dealership. She stiffly informed me
there's no way I paid off the loan for the car.

[I ask you, if I still owed money for this car don't you think the
dealership would have come after me by now? My address (in TN) didn't
change from the time I financed it to the time I paid it off. Neither did
my phone number. If I owed them money they'd have been tracking me down...
especially since the final payment was over $6000.]

So I called the dealership. Oh, we don't keep records longer than 3 years.
WHAT?! You have no record of me buying a car from you in 2003 and paying it
off in 2004? Nope, sorry. (In this wonderful world of modern technology,
their computers only go back 3 years?! My god, I was able to track down a
life insurance policy issued in 1947 but these people can't tell me I bought
a car from them in 2003. How utterly ridiculous!)

The woman at the dealership asked me what bank. I again patiently explained
I financed it through them, I didn't get a loan from *my* bank otherwise I'd
be talking to my bank. She said sure, she understood that, but what bank
was the dealership using then? Now how the hell am I supposed to know that?
More importantly, why don't *they* know that?! When I was making payments I
just put my check in the supplied envelope with the payment coupon and
mailed it. I don't remember the address it went to; we're talking 5 years
ago. She suggested I call my insurance company.

So I called my insurance company. They were very helpful, insofar as
possible. They gave me the name of a bank that probably handled the
financing for the dealership at that time. But that bank doesn't seem to
exist anymore. Great, what do I do now? She suggested I call the corporate
offices of the car dealership and explain the problem. huge sigh

Okay, so I called the corporate office of the dealership. You know by this
time I was tired of trying to explain the situation. The woman I spoke with
there said someone from the dealership where I bought my car would have had
to sign the title over to me. They probably forgot to inform the state.
Great, what do I do about that? They don't keep records older than 3 years!
She didn't know what to tell me.

I'll call MY bank tomorrow to see if they can get me a copy of the check I
wrote in 2004 paying off the car. That might give me a clue to work with.
(Hopefully my bank keeps records longer than 3 years! LOL At least it's
still the same bank, wasn't bought out or subject to the bail-out.)

Meanwhile, come April I'll just register the car in TN again. Legally I can
do that; I'm still a resident of TN. But what a huge bureaucratic nightmare
this one seemingly simple thing turned into!

/end rant

Jill