The notification conundrum

A friend is currently experiencing some...uhm...difficulties regarding an issue over an unpaid ticket...from 2001. As a result, her spouse must pay an exorbitant fee, take a driving test and so forth to get his license renewed. Paying it somehow fell through the cracks as things sometimes do.

I once had a similar experience where I pled not guilty, they were going to notify me of the court date...and instead I much later learned my license had been suspended for some time, a costly deal as well.

On top of the cost there is the frustration of needing to take the time (and chance, in some cases) to go to their facility (in my example, if I had driven myself I would have knowingly been driving with a suspended license...had I not been driving I would need to take an entire day off work to make it there because public trnasportation takes FOREVER. and a day besides.) to fix something that was completely unnecessary (and in my case I was additionally deprived of the opportunity to defend myself) had we only known about them.

It is interesting that some things the government is very good about notifying us of...how much we can contribute to get some chowderhead elected to misrepresent us, how much we have paid into the Social Scamurity fund, how much into (I need a) Medicaid and so forth. But useful information such as "You need to pay this or we will suspend your license" or where to find a competent politician? That sort of news is nowhere on the horizon. You can only find out by accident. Need help figuring out how to fund an education? Good luck with that. For a small fee manyu private institutions can help you but the government is kind of busy right now. Need help figuring out what cow flatulence is doing to the atmosphere and how it can be altered? they are all over that.

And this is the body we trust to institute stuff like Parental Notification Laws? (A concept, by the way, I am very much behind...too bad the chances of a reasonable, rationale, or useful plan for that being implemented are somewhere between Nil and Nada...and Nil just got deported back to Sweden. No word on where Nada is.

One can only wonder what notification will be like for truly important things...such as the launching of nuclear warheads or a Led Zeppelin reunion tour...