Thursday, 28 February 2002
Published 22 years, 5 months pastOhio is forcing everyone with old-style license plates (three letters, three numbers) to get the new “Bicentennial” plates, which are still six characters long. From what I can tell, the difference is that with the new plates the first and third character pairs go from AA through ZZ, and the middle pair from 00 through 99.
About a week ago, as I pulled up to a traffic light, I noticed the car in front of me had the license plate AA31FF
. Without even thinking about it, I did the translation in my head and came up with a shade of purple. Then I burst out laughing at myself. I fear I’m going to spend the next ten years seeing sporadic colors while driving, which is as strange a route to pseudo-synaesthesia as I can imagine.
When I went to reluctantly pick up my new plates, they didn’t bear a hexadecimal number.