Can’t you find other ways to be creative?

I’m going to tell you something. I’m going to break all the rules of Mandy and be absurdly blunt and straightforward without caring if it’s mean.

I think vanity plates are stupid.

I mean, downright stupid. If you have one and this hurts your feelings. . . well, my advice would be to take the advice given in the title of this post and find other ways to express the creativity that makes you uniquely and wonderfully you.

I just don’t understand vanity plates. I really don’t have a message I want all the world to decipher from code and random number-letter combos on my license plate(s). (In Tennessee, we only have one license plate—new for me when I moved here from MO.) And most vanity plates just end up making the driver look dumb. I went to high school with a guy who had something like “CUTMRO” on his plates. It took everyone forever to figure out that meant “See You Tomorrow.” And really, couldn’t he have just told people that rather than putting it on his license plate?

In the past few weeks, I saw a vanity plate that read “2LTHEL” or something similar. I’m guessing that meant “Too Lethal,” but really, just grammatically speaking, can something be “too” lethal? If it’s lethal, it’s lethal. Deadly. Over. Finished. There’s really no need for the adverb. Or using an e when it should be an a, even if it is on your silly vanity plates.

As I started writing this post, I even found a site that details the random weird things people like to put on vanity plates. Gems like: BFLAT (on a band teacher’s car), EZ4U2NV (easy for you to envy), and IB2BAD (I be too bad). Don’t even get me started on the grammar problems with that last one!

But, the reason for this post is sitting on the roof parking lot at my workplace. And I have to look at this randomly dumb plate every day as I walk into the building. It’s “1HOTPEPR” or something that gets “one hot pepper” across in the correct number of characters. Every morning, I look at it and wonder what would possess someone to pick that as his or her vanity plate message? Do they like jalapenos? Does the driver think he/she is “one hot pepper” and therefore, amazingly hot and too hot to handle?

I. Don’t. Know!

But that doesn’t stop me from being any less annoyed by it.

So, I’ll CUTMRO. And IBCNU.

Yeah, whatever.