If you ever go to buy a new car and you happen to have had personalized license plates on your old car, and the dealer very cheerfully tells you that they can take care of the transfer paperwork for you, do not believe them. They know not of what they speak. Sure, they may have the correct form to fill out, and sure you and they may both make very sure that you sign on all the correct dotted lines, but in the murky and incomprehensible world of the DMV, this is all irrelevant. And when, after nearly six weeks of waiting, you finally receive your registration for your new car – a car which you have been driving around for the aforementioned six weeks with your old license plate on it because you were under the impression that the transfer really was taking place as promised, you will discover that it was all a big fat lie. You will discover this because not only will they send you a lovely new registration form and sticker, they will also send you new license plates. New, boring license plates that have no personalization at all.

This will then require you to track down the nearest DMV, and then take an hour or six out of your busy work day (because DMV's are, much like post offices, allergic to ever being open during useful hours) in order to take care of the license plate transfer yourself. This will also require you to track down a screwdriver and wrestle the old plates off the car, thereby getting grease and gunk all over your fingers in the process, so that you can bring them in to the DMV in order to show them to the person behind the counter so they can charge you money for the privilege of putting them right back on your car again later.

If you are very, very lucky, you will stumble across a newly built (or renovated – I'm not sure) DMV office which, unlike every other DMV office you have ever encountered, is clean, quick, and efficient, and even more amazingly, staffed with people who actually seem to *want* to be helpful, and also do it while smiling and being pleasant. You will check several times to make sure that you really *are* in a DMV office, because surely there must be a mistake because there is a distinct and noticeable lack of surly, but sure enough, it really is true. And they will commiserate with you for having to do this, and hand you a new little registration form and a new little registration sticker and will send you on your way with a smile and a cheerful farewell and then you can finally remove the stupid temporary registration thing from the window of your new car and feel confident that the license plates you have on your car are the right ones. And you will also remind yourself that next time a car dealer tells you anything, anything at all, that you must not believe them because if they will lie about something so obviously easy to dispute like transferring your license plates for you, they could just as well lie about anything.