Driven Crazy

After a two-year struggle with the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, my husband and I finally have a new title for an old car that has been sitting in our garage for six years.

The car belonged to my mother in law, who lived with us before passing away in 2005. We found it hard to deal with her sudden passing, so it wasn’t until 2009 that I tried to get rid of her car, which sat in our garage unusable (since we didn’t renew the insurance or registration, not to mention that the battery died) for years.

The person who served as the executor of her will is a New York City-based lawyer that my mother-in-law hired in the early 1970s. Since his signature was required on the back of the car’s title to transfer ownership of it, I sent the title to him to be signed. He signed it and mailed it back to us, he said, but it has to this day never arrived in the mail.

That is when our saga started with the motor vehicle commission. It took my husband no less than six visits to motor vehicles to get a duplicate title for the car, and then to get a new title for it in his name.

Why did the process take so long? Part of the reason is that my husband has a busy job that often requires him to work long hours, often on the weekends. The times he could visit a motor vehicles commission location were few and far between. But the main problem was that when he visited the motor vehicle offices, he was constantly given misinformation by MVC staff that caused us to lose valuable time.

MVC staff told him he needed to complete certain forms and then get that form signed by the New York City lawyer. So, my husband and I would go to the hassle of getting the form signed and then getting that form to and from the lawyer, only to find out on my husband’s next visit to motor vehicles that the form was either not the correct form, or that an additional form was required.

We were about to pull our hair out. Then, on our final visit to the MVC, we strode into the office confident that we would finally get the documentation that we needed. But, after looking over our official forms (including a short certificate from Mercer County), the MVC from behind the desk announced that our copy of the short certificate wasn’t an official copy and that we needed an official copy before anything could be done. I was quite upset.

Once outside the office, I leafed through our documents and found that our short certificate was indeed an official copy and had a raised seal on it. We raced back into the office (which was about to close), and about 15 minutes later, we had a brand-new title for the old car in our hands. We were elated.

A day later, an interested buyer was at our house. He had a mechanic friend look the car over, and before I knew it, was driving the old car down the road. The car is now out of our garage, freeing us to use it again. The best part of it all is that we don’t have to worry about getting rid of the car, and even better, we don’t have to hassle with MVC about getting a title for the car.

The ordeal has shown me how hard it can be to get stuff around the house, especially when bureaucratic and legal red tape gets tangled up in it.