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Comment by yongjik

6 years ago

Reminds me of the story of Ireland's worst Polish driver who never got caught: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7899171....

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yongjik

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rebuilder  6 years ago

I've also heard a similar story of a Finnish man who got a ticket in the UK, and on closer inspection found his name on the ticket listed as Mr. Ajokortti Körkort. Thats "driver's licence", first in Finnish, then Swedish, and is written at the top of the driver's license card.

That said, I find these stories a little hard to credit, since you'd expect police officers in the EU to be fairly familiar with the standard EU driver's license layout.

  • mikeash  6 years ago

    You’d expect offices in the US to be familiar with US states and territories, but that doesn’t stop them from occasionally demanding a passport from people from New Mexico, or saying a license is fake because there’s no such state as “District of Columbia.”

    • zxcvbn4038  6 years ago

      I once had a Texas policemen unholster his pistol on me because he thought my US Passport was a fake ID and my travelers checks were some sort of scam. Then his backup arrived and explained both items to him — and the Dairy Queen cashier that had called 911 on me. Stuff like that is why you have to stay on the interstate.

      7 replies →

  • hansjorg  6 years ago

    > you'd expect police officers in the EU to be fairly familiar with the standard EU driver's license layout

    The common design for all the EEA countries was supposed to be implemented by the members by the start of 2013 according to Wikipedia.

    Until 2033 there will be valid licenses that were issued before the common license, so there's still a lot of different designs out there.

    • tialaramex  6 years ago

      Also, the common design, like with passports, provides numbers for the boxes, so e.g. 1 is "Name" and 2 is "First Name" and 5 is your license number with whichever authority issued the license. But it doesn't take a _very_ stupid person to write down stuff that's in the wrong box or not in a box at all when all of it seems like moon language to you.

      Probably better to have a machine scan the identity document, not least because the machine can trivially avoid freaking out over "Nick Smith, born 2000-01-04" when the wanted criminal was actually "Mick Smith, born 2000-04-01".

  • diatribattical  6 years ago

    I once had a BevMo cashier in California ask me, “Massachusetts? Is that in Canada?”

    Very little faith left.

    • madcaptenor  6 years ago

      I once had a cab driver take me to MIT. Cab driver: "what is this place?" Me: "MIT" Cab driver: "what's MIT?" Me: "the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." Cab driver: "what's Massachusetts?"

      10 replies →

    • impeachTheIdiot  6 years ago

      Yea, but it’s understandable an America sucks a geography (what do you expect with a shit education system). I expect better from the EU.

  • dmurray  6 years ago

    Irish driving licences didn't start to use the standard credit-card-sized EU format until a few years ago. They were paper booklets which had long since been phased out in the rest of Europe.

    • roelschroeven  6 years ago

      Here in Belgium new driving licenses are of the standard credit-card design (I don't know exactly since when), but most people still have the old folded paper design. Since the old licenses are still valid, and the new designs require renewal every 5 years which the old ones don't, there is no incentive for people to swap their old license for a new one.