Man Butts Heads with DMV and gets the last laugh with pennies, hit the linkA Cedar Bluff, Va., man by the name of Nick Stafford says he attempted to call the Lebanon DMV in September with a “30-second question.” He needed an inquiry about registering a new car but reached a call center in Richmond and was put on hold for more than an hour. He then got a number for the Lebanon DMV through a Freedom of Information Act request, but was told it wasn’t for public use. An employees eventually answered his question, but wouldn’t give up the numbers to nine other local DMVs, Stafford says, so he sued for them.
The suits were dismissed this past Tuesday, but Stafford did end up getting those numbers, which he posted online. And as a further inconvenience, Stafford opted to pay $2,987.45 in sales tax for two cars with pennies, five wheelbarrows full of them. He bought the wheelbarrows for $400 and paid 11 people $10 per hour to break open rolls of pennies over four hours, meaning the scheme cost him $840. DMV workers spent 12 hours counting his pennies, which jammed a coin-counting machine. Considering such an enormous task, they were surprisingly “respectful and accommodating,” Stafford says on his website. “Moral of the story, NEVER, ever, tell a slightly rebellious, yet knowledgeable and well informed tax paying citizen… he is not ‘allowed’ to call a phone number that HE is already paying for.”
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