Say for instance you’re a person in your seventies and you get up today feeling pretty good about life till you open the letter from the Connecticut Department of Vehicles and see it’s time to renew the car registration. Still you’re okay, though. Every couple of years a few bucks to the governor, you can deal with it.
But then the letter says:
If you are 65 or older, you can renew a passenger motor vehicle for one year at $43 or for two years at $85. It is your choice.
After bouncing back from that little brush with the wings of the angel of death, you do the arithmetic and realize that rounding it off to $43 instead of $42 means the governor will be four bits up for the registration year even if you croak on the last day of it, and how cheap is that even for a Republican?
You'd have to be in your seventies to know what four bits means.
Posted by: Aitch Jay on June 17, 2008 7:05 PMI seem to remember we used to have stamps denominated in bits and francs in the Danish West Indies. Mind, this was before the Great War, the first one, I mean, but the lowest value was five bits. What does it mean to renew a motor vehicle anyway? Where have all the horses gone?
Posted by: Peter on June 19, 2008 8:19 AM