Its interesting in life how uninformed you can be about where youre at.
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Im not just referring to David Leyonhjelm here.
Or Australias position in World Soccer.
Or turning up to a supermarket to confront the plastic bag apocalypse.
Im talking about transitioning to the age of the internet, and how one moment you think youre here, but youre actually there, and any thoughts in between are an illusion.
Take registering your car for example.
The move away from paperwork to a more cyber-based system is practical on so many fronts.
You dont have to line up for CTP, you dont have to queue at the RTA, you dont even have to know what thought crime is.
All you have to do is not lose the one bit of old school that makes the process work the rego renewal paper.
Without it, youre a good chance of forgetting to rego your car.
And lets face it, 12 months is a long time.
And perhaps its natural you try and block out the pain of that last rego inspection.
As ignorant as that bliss may seem, driving an unregistered car is technically illegal and a real worry now that Big Brother is watching ever so capably.
Alas the renewal comes in the mail, and like so many things from ancient times, is always a chance of getting lost in the pile of paper at the end of the kitchen bench.
But realisation has a funny way of setting in, and through pain comes learning.
That is the internet way.
The conversation started off innocently enough about a hunch that something was wrong. It wasnt just Leyonhjelm.
More a feeling a bill hadnt been paid. Nothing to do with the car rego at that stage. Roadside assistance actually.
The idea we were driving around with no back-up caused a bit of anxiety.
A review of receipts revealed the payment had not been made, generating a slight sense of relief that at least we knew.
But its what you dont know that can blindside you. A further review of receipts revealed no evidence of a CTP payment for the car either.
Leading to pretty reasonable queries about the registration status of the vehicle, and from that, wide-eyed wonderings about that RBT we encountered recently.
Must have been line ball being asked to step out of the car.
Which gets us back to the age of the internet.
Proponents say you can manage all your affairs online these days, like thats a good thing.
They also say that if you cant manage to set up an online account to get your car rego alerts, then thats your problem.
And indeed it was as we set about linking and syncing our identities to the mainframe to register online.
Five hours later we were sorted (who says the internet sux?).
Thankfully were now back to being as legit as we ever thought we were.
But give me a sec and Ill log into Service NSW to confirm that.
