Dealing with the TLAs

Welcome, officious reader, for today I'm going to regale you with a blow-by-blow account of my attempts to buy a car. Yes, it's going to be a ranty one!

Regular readers will know that I've been leasing a car, and as we come to the end of the lease I've decided to buy it outright. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Pay the money to the people I leased it from, maybe, just maybe, sign a form online, and we're done. Well that's how it would work in the UK. Here... well let's just say that years of under-investment in public services don't make it quite that simple.

Paying off a lease involves interacting with the California Department of Motor Vehicles - the famous DMV, a paragon of efficiency. It also involves lots of legalese which my simple European brain doesn't really understand - transfer of title, liens, smog checks, a whole bunch of things which don't really seem entirely relevant. And of course, there isn't really any documentation to help you through this process.

A few weeks back you'll recall I sent a check (that's a cheque to those of you on the Eastern side of the Atlantic; you probably don't remember, but you stopped using them about 15 years ago) off to Toyota to pay off the lease. Though the antiquity of this process was not lost on me, there was of course more to come. Eventually, Toyota sent me something which looked a bit like an official form, with of course no instructions on it as to what to do. Hmm... so do I have to fill this in and send it to the DMV, or what?

Well, it turns out, the DMV are the height of technocratic sophistication and allow you to do this online, or so they say. What "do it online" actually means is: fill in the form, scan it, email it to us. OK, so far, so frustrating, particularly as it looks like you only have one attempt to fill in this important-looking form and not get it wrong, and it's far from clear that I have to fill it in at all.

So anyway, I left it all blank and mailed it off. Within 24 hours I got an email back saying I had to actually fill in the form, then resubmit, which I did. Then another 24 hours later I got another email saying I also needed to submit something called the "Bill of Sale" from Toyota. Hmm, not sure I've seen such a thing but... rummaging around in the envelope Toyota sent me, oh yes, there's something there with the words "Bill of Sale" on it. OK, now we're good?

Well, nope. Another 24 hours goes by, and I get another email saying I have to fill in something called a REG256 part B to avoid the smog fee, whatever that is. At least, I think they meant the smog fee, although that's not what they actually wrote:

Now obviously in these COVIDy times I was keen to avoid any unnecessary snogging with strangers at the DMV, so I found the REG256 form online, filled in part B (itself completely ridiculous; you just have to tick a box to say you're exempt from a smog check because you're simply passing the vehicle from lessee to lessor, which the DMV already know), and sent it back. Now we're good to go?

Well, nope. Within 24 hours I got another email saying I owed the DMV $1,697.00 for the pleasure of receiving this first-class service, and please could I pay this before they could do anything more. I paid it, dear reader, and I have to assume we're now done with this, but I guess we'll see. Perhaps I should have caved in and submitted to the snogging after all.

Anyway, it's clear I have essentially no idea what I'm doing here and presumably if you're Californian born and bred this is all obvious. Even assuming I have to go through this backwards process of filling in forms and scanning them, it would have saved a lot of time and effort if they'd simply told me up front the complete list of stuff I needed to submit. It's traditional at this point to say "it's not exactly rocket science" but it's not even science; I'm simply asking for a written list of the requirements for what must be a relatively common operation. It's almost like this is intentionally inefficient by design. UK people, give thanks for the DVLA!

OK, so now we're done, right?

Well, nope. 3 days after taking the payment, they email me again and tell me that to finish the process I need to mail off the originals of all the forms to an address in Sacramento, and if I don't they won't be able to complete it. So why do any of this online at all if you need the original forms to finish it off? OK, maybe, just maybe, this saves some time with validating the forms. But there's an adaptation of one of the Beevers laws of software engineering in here: validation is no substitute for having a process which is easy to navigate. It's now a week since I started this process and it's taken up quite a bit of my time, not to mention the much more valuable time of the DMV.

Folks, just make it easy, and make it doable online. It's not hard.