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.”

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.

can you elaborate on this story? why the hell did the cashier call 911 on you, and what state were you from?

how long ago was this?

Based on "traveler's checks", I'm going to guess at least a couple decades ago. Cashier probably called 911 because they thought GP was trying to commit fraud with "fake money".

I mean, in what world can you cash travelers cheques at a dairy queen?

It's been a very long time, but my grandmother always used to give me spending money for vacations in the form of Amex traveller's checks. IIRC you could use them in essentially any situation where you could use an ordinary paper check (which was substantially more common back in those days).

Dairy Queen was a favorite from my childhood, I had moved away from Texas years earlier so I decided to indulge while visiting. These days I’m more into Sonic - the food is better, they have a greater variety of sweet treats, and I really like their iOS app.

Wait, you tried to pay with travelers checks at a Dairy Queen?

Yeah, do you want to get shot?

I've been at some tournaments where a couple of the kids had the last name "Bye". They picked up a fair number of forfeits during the season.

Wow, that's an awesome last name for a tennis player :)

NASCAR -- have your name on the rear bumper.

> 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.

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".

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

Very little faith left.

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?"

I've heard that, three blocks from Caltech, many people have never heard of the university.

I had a cab driver in New York who was unable to take me to the Brooklyn Bridge.

... well it keeps getting sold.

Possibly didn't want to take you into Brooklyn. The Manhattan side isn't really walkable.

I was already on the Brooklyn side. But the issue was literally that he had no idea what the Brooklyn Bridge was, not the precise drop-off location. (We just wanted to look around Dumbo for a bit.)

Wow! Hard to think of a more iconic landmark in that case.

Someone else is probably out there complaining a cab driver wouldn't give them a ride to the Statue of Liberty.

Not to be confused with the world class educational institution the Manukau Institute of Technology :P

I always find it funny when I drive by that and I see the sign MIT.

Move over plebs, some people study at the Royal MIT: https://www.rmit.edu.au/

I find the German language funny because "mit" just means "with". I remember search engines having trouble with this in the late nineties.

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.

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.