GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - Claim: A man whose car bore personalized license plates reading 'NO PLATE' received n

Claim: A man whose car bore personalized license plates reading 'NO
PLATE' received notices for thousands of unpaid parking tickets.

http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/noplate.asp

Claim: A man whose car bore personalized license plates reading 'NO
PLATE' received notices for thousands of unpaid parking tickets.

Status: True.

Origins: This
episode began in 1979, when a Los Angeles man named Robert Barbour
sent in an application to the Department of Motor Vehicles requesting
personalized license plates for his car. The DMV form asked
applicants to list three choices in case one or two of their desired
selections had already been assigned. Barbour, a sailing enthusiast,
wrote down "SAILING" and "BOATING" as his first two choices; when he
couldn't think of a third option, he wrote "NO PLATE," meaning that
if neither of his two choices was available, he did not want
personalized plates. "BOATING" and "SAILING" had indeed already been
assigned, and the DMV, following instructions literally, send Barbour
license plates reading "NO PLATE." Barbour was not thrilled that the
DMV had misunderstood his intent, but he eventually opted to keep the
plates because of their uniqueness.

Four weeks later he received his first notice for an overdue parking
fine, from faraway San Francisco, and within days he began receiving
dozens of overdue notices from all over the state on a daily basis.
Why? Because when law enforcement officers ticketed illegally parked
cars that bore no license plates, they had been writing "NO PLATE" in
the license plate field. Now that Barbour had plates bearing that
phrase, the DMV computers were matching every unpaid citation issued
to a car with missing plates to him.

Barbour received about 2,500 notices over the next several months. He
alerted the DMV to the problem, and they responded in a typically
bureaucratic way by instructing him to change his license plates. But
Barbour had grown too fond of his plates by then to want to change
them, so he instead began mailing out a form letter in response to
each citation. That method usually worked, although occasionally he
had to appear before a judge and demonstrate that the car described
on the citation was not his.

A couple of years later, the DMV finally caught on and sent a notice
to law enforcement agencies requesting that they use the word NONE
rather than NO PLATE to indicate a cited vehicle was missing its
plates. This change slowed the flow of overdue notices Barbour
received to a trickle, about five or six a month, but it also had an
unintended side effect: Officers sometimes wrote MISSING instead of
NONE to indicate cars with missing license plates, and suddenly a man
named Andrew Burg in Marina del Rey started receiving parking tickets
from places he hadn't visited either. Burg, of course, was the owner
of a car with personalized plates reading "MISSING."