This has already been resolved, but I just had to share the misery... er... the story.

Long story short, I received a letter from the CA Dept. of Motor Vehicles telling me my registration would be suspended because they had no proof of insurance. I spoke w/ my insurance company four times and they had no clue why DMV was not accepting their repeated tries at giving them my info. I also tried DMV's online registration "service" and their automated voice "service," to no avail. So yesterday I called the insurance company again, and the person offered to call DMV for me.

That's the build-up. Now here's the punch line:

It turns out that I was all set (from some unspecified point in the process), but the DMV computers would not accept the ongoing attempts because "they already had the information." So, instead of their computers (read "programmers") saying, we already have that, they kept saying "we can't verify proof of insurance." There is apparently no way to have their system say you're good to go.

Is this a great story for Dilbert? Or should I file it under "My tax dollars at work?"

Don't you just love technology? We had a similar situation, where my wife was disputing a credit card payment, which the company claimed had not been received. The rep on the phone was adamant that what she saw on her computer screen was "gospel." It took forever to sort out. Turns out that if only she had scrolled down the page, she would have seen (on the very next line) that our payment had been made.

The DMV is a special circle of Hell here on Earth.

I had something similar once, many years ago. We sent a travel agency money for our annual trip to Disney World (yeah, we used to make that kind of money.)

We get a notice from the agency that our check had bounced. The bank said they'd paid it. This went on for three days until we finally went TO the travel agency and talked to the agent. He held up the check and said; "See this? It says, 'funds not available!' " Then he looked at it more closely and said; "Wait, it also says, 'paid.' " He got on the phone and it turned out the clerk in charge had put the check through, stamped it, then got distracted by something and came back and tried to put the check through AGAIN! Of course, there wasn't that kind of money in the account so the check bounced the second time.

Neither the agency or the bank noticed that the same check had been processed twice.

I wish we'd been nastier people. I wonder what we could have gotten if we hadn't accepted their apologies and started making noises about lawsuits!

Best trip to WDW we ever had though!