So yesterday, I opened the envelope from the Secretary of State, prepared to renew the registration for Cygnus, Moooon Yooonit, and one of the motor botes.

This turned out to be rather a long confusing ordeal. I was able to renew the motor bote (or so I thought). Then I tried Cygnus. It would not let me renew Cygnus’s registration. We were not in the registration period. Say what? I have been renewing car registrations online every year since the late 1990s and this has never been a problem before. Eventually, after much scrutiny and thought, I figured out that I could not renew it because it was NOT DUE UNTIL 2027. Whut? It turned out that the GG renewed all this stuff last year and there was an option to select a two-year registration so he selected it.

Okay. That’s fine. But then, because I never actually checked out and paid for the motor bote’s registration, I later got an email that the renewal had been canceled. So. I did it again. This time, I was asked to provide the date of issue for my driver’s license. And that led to a moment of sheer panic. Wait! Wasn’t I supposed to renew my driver’s license last month? I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t received any paperwork in the mail. Mail delivery can sometimes be flaky here so did it get lost? Have I been driving on an expired license for the last month? Nervously, I pulled my faded driver’s license out of my purse/pocket. Whew! It ALSO doesn’t expire until 2027. When did they extend the licensing period from four to five years? I do not know but the last time I renewed it was 2022.

This is not to mention the less than perfect user experience I had doing all this. How many times did I have to do two-factor authentication via text message to complete this stuff? Something like three or four maybe? This stuff was pretty seamless back in the late 1990s. I know that as fraudsters et al have gotten more sophisticated over the years, any system that deals with personal/financial information has had to be made more secure. But jeebus. What should’ve taken maybe 10 minutes tops took a half hour or so and multiple restarts. And I have expertise in this kind of stuff.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 21st, 2026 at 9:02 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.