Plate

  I never had a vanity license plate for my car.  Personalizing it just wasn't what I wanted.  Maybe it was a little paranoia, but I just didn't want to stand out in traffic.  I wanted anonymity.  I just took whatever plate the DMV would send me.

 One day, I got the plate in the mail, and to my surprise, the plate read "DMW 777".  It had my initials spelled backwards plus three "7s", which was my lucky number.  When I had plates before, I had to remember them by making up words that were close to the letters and numbers.  Now, it was a no brainer.  Was it a stroke of luck that I had this special plate?  Was it random?  I didn't really have a clue, but I knew I could easily remember it.

 I worked at Columbia Mall, which had some crime areas near there.  It wasn't in the best of neighborhoods.  As I was getting off work from Macy's, a friend wanted me to see her new car.  When I walked back to my car, I saw that my license plate was gone.  It couldn't have fallen off, because I had securely fastened it.  There had been a rash of stolen license plates from cars in the parking lot.  Panic set in.  What if the person used my plate on a car involved in a crime, and I would be blamed for it.

 There was a Richland County Sheriff's substation inside the mall.  I went in there to report my stolen license plate.  They told me I wasn't the first one that this had happened to, which I already knew.  They gave me a slip of paper to take to the DMV to get a new plate and to present to any officer, if I got stopped before getting to the DMV.  Thankfully, there was a DMV close to the mall, so I didn't have to go far.  I could take a lot of backroads getting to the mall from my apartment so as to avoid as many officers as possible.

 I got a new plate with random letters and numbers.  I really liked "DMW 777".  I hope whoever used it after me liked it, too.  All the way to jail.