yandao.com - Memoirs of a player wannabe

Woohooo! My driving license!

GAHH, Look how shiny, sparkling, and so beautiful it is! And the Singapore crest, and and the.. Well, everything. It’s a beautiful card because you can drive a car with it. Hahaha! And a van, too, I think. Maybe even a pickup, or a go-kart.

Oh yes, quick lesson for you all. If you’re ever gonna post up pictures of any official document or ID or IC or student pass or whichever personal document, remember to mosiac or BLACK OUT (means drawing a black box over) the following:

• - The usual, your NRIC numbers, and your Chinese name, if it sounds funny. (Ya lah, my Chinese name damn kuku can? It’s apparently the same name as a girl I know.)
• - The barcodes. This hor, is VERY important, because barcodes can be SO easily duplicated, and can cause you SO much trouble and damage. FYI, the barcode on your NRIC and Student Pass is using Code 39A – (you can see how the barcode works here – and you can even make barcodes of.. anyone’s NRIC number here – but bear in mind that misusing it is very illegal)
• - Also, the barcodes on the LETTER/envelope itself. Well, those barcodes consist of your address, er, postal code. So if you want everyone to know where you stay……

Okay, end of quick lesson. Back to what I was saying before.

Yay, so I’ve got my driving license, and now, what can I do with it?

No, I can’t drive my dad’s car because he doesn’t have one: People in the accounts line have a tendency to be more ngiao with their expenditure, you see, and he counts every cent in for mantaining a car, hence – no car.

I set off to find a new car to buy, yay! (screw the fact that my bank account would be losing a few zeros – from four zeros behind, to three zeroes.) – and I found that, wow, old cars can actually be bought REAL cheap – not those old until boxy kind, but those old yet curvy kind. No WAY am I going to be seen driving a boxy vehicle. No way!

Here, you’ll find cars at like, under 10k (Singapore dollars, of course – you think rupiah meh?) with around 3 years of CoE left, and apparently, it *looks* cheap.. until the time you’re about to put the cash down for the car. You know, the time when you are so damned excited, and withdrew cash inside a brown/manila envelope in fifty dollar bills.. and then the original owner tells you the following:

• Seller: “Bro ah, you know you have to renew road tax right? But this is old car [above 15 years old], so got 50% surcharge, so the road tax adds up to $1400+ a year“
  • - Uh, okay, 1.4k’s still managable – but the surcharge was really.. redundant? I mean, you Gahmen/[whichever department in charge.. is it LTA?] encourage Singaporeans to cut down on WASTE, yet impose surcharges if we want to use an *old* vehicle?
• Seller: “Transfer fees we split half-half”
  • - Half half of a $400+ transfer fee to LTA? Wow, I never knew it took *that* much effort to like, right click > edit a name inside the computer to reflect another name. Truth be told, even if the official reason was that there was paperwork to be done, I would say that they are inefficient, because shouldn’t it be paperless already? – like, er, all in databases? So where does the $400 go to? Mantaining the servers?
• Seller: “Oh yes, you have to settle your insurance first, before I can transfer you”
  • - Ah, insurance.. This is a touchy topic.. Having heard from friends that insurance costed several hundreds only, I was rather optimistic. Say $800/year would account to around less than.. 100 bucks/month. Fair enough, but….

..but thing is, when I e-mailed requesting for a quote, this is what I received:

Wow, insurance costs.. $3565/year!?

Yea, wow. $3.5k/year? What *is* this craziness? The Honda Civic ESI I was looking at only costed $7.5k for 3 years worth of CoE!, that means, $2.5k/year averaged out. Why is insurance more than the vehicle itself? This is stupid, it’s like saying, “Oh, go spend $1000 to guard your $100 handphone“. Damn stupid.

Of course, the official reason given was that:

• Insurance Agent: “Kelvin, you don’t have any driving experience”
  • My Response: “If you don’t let me buy an old car to drive, how to have experience?”
• Insurance Agent: “Kelvin, you’re still a P-Plate holder, dangerous for P-Plate holder to drive”
  • My Response: “The P-Plate signifies that you have just passed your license, and that means that you just CAME OUT FROM THE DRIVING SCHOOL not long ago. If you don’t drive for a time lapse of say, 1 year, so that you are no longer a P-Plate holder – don’t you think its MORE dangerous that way? Come on, remember the time when you didn’t ride a bicycle for 5~10 years, can still remember how to write steadily?
• Insurance Agent: “Kelvin, you’re 19 and covering anyone under 21 costs significantly more”
  • My Response: “That 19 years old and 21 year old crap is bullshit. You’re afraid of the 21-year-old clause because if you wanna sue me for some reason, suing someone under 21 is significantly more difficult, because the person is not a certified “adult” yet”.

Makes so much sense, right? The way large insurance corporations *think* they can calculate how “risky” you are based on your age group and all. The might as well justify that females are more dangerous at driving than males… Oh wait, they DO justify it that way!

Ladies: Try asking for a quotation (free) on car insurance, and you will see

I thought in other countries like the US, it’s considered as discrimination? Sounds so awfully like that to me.

Fine, so, it makes absolute sense having to pay *double* the price of the car, because of insurance policies and crappy big heads sitting at the top of organizations who make this call. No wonder they’re so rich, and we have to climb up the ladder… but that’s life in Singapore, isn’t it?

GAH. Now got to make a choice between saving $3.5k a year, or getting the (beautiful, to me) Civic ESI Though one.