Slurpees & Murder

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Disagree though you may, specialty and vanity license plates have almost always struck me as completely stupid. So I’ll admit I wasn’t the target audience for MPI’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers specialty license plates, unveiled about a month ago. Furthermore, I’ll admit that I wasn’t a particularly big fan of the plates’ cluttered design and — really, guys? — gradient background.
   
But I did agree that, unlike most specialty and vanity plates, the idea was sound; a one-time fee of $70 would allow fans a new opportunity to show their team loyalty, our beloved but frustrating football team would raise $30 for every plate sold and, since the plates are limited to a special commemorative number formatted as BB####, they would be assigned in numerical order instead of letting people decide what too-cute seven-character encryption would appear as their identifier. 
   
(Even letting people pick their own numbers would have been a mess; everybody would have been disappointed that they weren’t the first to get BB2011, BB2012 or BB0085, and you just know there’d have been that one guy inevitably demanding BB6969 as his plate.)
   
Since it meant a new fundraising avenue for a formerly fiscally-troubled team, and since having these plates meant we finally caught up to Saskatchewan on something (Roughrider plates having been available since last year), I ultimately figured that — though I did not necessarily find the plates attractive — I could understand paying the money for one.
   
Certain elements of our shared society, however, apparently took the view completely opposite to mine: they decided that they couldn’t understand paying for one, but that the plates were just too attractive not to have. And so — hands up if you saw this coming — they began stealing them. Yep! Just plucking them straight off the cars in broad daylight, that special combination of despicable and inevitable that gives any story its special Winnipeg flavor.
   
There’s really not a whole lot you can do with a stolen license plate except hide it and maybe look at it from time to time, especially when the plate is tied by number to its original owner and instantly recognizable as being a limited-edition, limited-run collectible. So limited a run, in fact, that people were unable to get replacements for their stolen $70 license plates; hear tell is that the plates are now completely out of stock, MPI not having thought to print extras and duplicates for circumstances such as these. (This sort of thing, in football parlance, is referred to as a "missed assignment.")
   
News reports after the fact offered the public the helpful tip of buying theft-proof or tamper-proof license plate bolts, which run somewhere between four to six bucks for a package. So if I may just offer a small but hopefully helpful suggestion for MPI, which ran this promotion as a pilot project: if you do decide to grant specialty license plates to other interested groups in the future, and you charge $70 for the plates, and you won’t have any extras or backup copies left, please consider buying these bolts in bulk and including a package of them with each plate upon purchase. I’m sure that you can bundle them into the cost of the plate somewhere, and it’ll save your poor front-line employees an awful lot of hassle when fewer plates get pilfered and fewer angry ratepayers have to be informed that they’re going back to standard signage.
   
As for me, I’ll stick to regular license plates. But my car does struggle to start, lose key parts and then has to be rebuilt every year or two, so I like to think that my Bomber solidarity is shown regardless. True Blue!
   
James Hope Howard is always ready to help construct a beer snake.
   
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