Two people can be friends but needn’t necessarily always be on the same page. That’s the view of my mate, Barney, and although it’s not often that I see eye to eye with his point of view, I find myself in agreement.
Sometimes, he says, friendship blossoms because of its differences. If we all agreed with everything the other person said or thought, it would make for a boring existence. And that is not a profound statement. We have heard it many times before. Barney reckons that a real friend is one who can see right through you but still enjoy the show.
Barney, who has a long list of mates, counts among them the local government. He voted them in and, additionally, did his best to canvass votes in their favour from neighbours and friends. Despite his somewhat conservative outlook at times, he is a self-confessed liberal at heart.
Only, now he’s had a run-in with this friend (the government), for the moment at least, he’s singing from a different hymn sheet.
It began a fortnight ago when his car was pulled over by the local police. The very act of a police car behind his vehicle signalling him to pull over he found both offensive and surprising. He says he’s never had that happen in all his driving life and he’s never been a rash motorist. So it surprised him even more when the officer who sauntered up to Barney’s rolled-down window informed him that he was driving an unregistered vehicle. Barney said he first turned crimson (with anger) then pink (with embarrassment) when he realised that he had, indeed, left half the registration payment unpaid, was meaning to get it done and then completely forgot about it.
Paying for his mistake
The officer, a gentle-natured man, told him to drive into the nearest side street and pay the outstanding amount via the internet, which Barney did. The officer also told him he’d receive the standard notification in the mail. They parted amicably. Barney said he got the impression that he’d received a rap on the knuckles, nothing more.
Three letters from the transport department a week later indicated this was not the case. He’d been fined for his transgression, a hefty sum of A$659 (Dh1,797), and the letters were proof in his hand, in triplicate! So, grumbling but conscious it was his mistake, he paid up. End of story, he thought. Only, a few days later he received a reminder that two of his fines were still outstanding. What? He re-examined the three letters.
Only after careful scrutiny (reading the very fine print) did he realise he was being fined for three separate offences, each of them to the tune of A$659, taking the total of the one offence of forgetting to fully pay his registration to a grand sum of A$1,977. (The year of his eldest son’s birth, but he didn’t find the coincidence amusing at all.)
He’s currently on the warpath with the local government, describing some of their activities as ‘dictatorship in disguise’ and the officials as a cowardly bunch of robin hoods, robbing from the poor to line their already overflowing coffers.
I am usually amused by Barney and his antics, which are cloaked in high drama. But on this occasion, I feel for him. I am staggered that a person can be fined so much for one offence. I am even more staggered that the letter cautions him against appealing the charge, noting that less than one per cent of those who’ve taken a case to court have ended up winning. Whatever became of the notion of giving a truly forgetful man a second chance? When I posit this query aloud, Barney waves it aside in disgust, citing, ‘The only forgettable thing right now is these guys in charge. I’ve erased them from my favourites list and I’ll do everything to bring my experience to the public.’
An enemy, as they say, is easily made. Just give him a triple-offence fine.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
