Blair's Blog

This week, on Wednesday, I saw one of the new format Alberta license plates for the first time. A couple of years ago the Alberta government announced a contest to design a new license plate to replace the current design which has been in circulation since 1984 as the pool of ABC-123 format combinations was due to run out. After running the competition, the recession hit and the government decided that replacing every plate in the province was an avoidable expense and announced instead that the format would be changed to simply add another digit (ABC-1234) for newly issued plates. Both formats will be valid for the foreseeable future.

It looks like they plan to avoid vowels; the first two plates the I saw were BBF, but I have since seen a couple of BBB plates. The typeface is definitely narrower and will make the license plate game a little more challenging as the plates are a bit harder to read, especially at an angle or in poor light.

For those of you following along at home, I’m looking for plate 633 right now, or x633 on a new format plate.

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We started the day with green waffles!  Thanks, Brenda.

Today is also the anniversary of the day that I started playing the license plate game, 7 years ago.  You might remember my post from last year where I described the rules.  This past year was a good year for spotting plates; I’ve seen 603 plates in order since I started the game.  In the past year that’s 103 plates, well above the long term average of the first 6 years of 83 plates per year.

That brings the new average rate since I began playing up to a little over 86 plates/year (7.2 plates per month) or 1  plate every 4.2 days. Unfortunately, it’s not consistent – sometimes I’ve seen several plates in a day and other times weeks will go by before I find the plate I’m looking for.

By the way, despite the Alberta government claiming that the ABC-123 format plate pool would be exhausted in summer 2009 and that ABC-1234 format plates would be out before 2010, I have not yet seen a plate in the new format.

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That’s “Continuous Number Plate Spotting”, or more often, just “the licence plate game”.  The game is a bit of OCD foolishness that has afflicted a number of my friends and family over the past few years.  The game has been around in various forms for a long while and gained some prominence in Britain about 5 years ago when a popular comic and TV personality started to play the game.  It  involves spotting car licence plates bearing each of the possible 3 digit number combinations from 000 to 999 in strict numerical order.  It takes a bit of time to play…

Tomorrow I’ll be celebrating my 6th anniversary of playing the game and today, the last day of the 6th full year of play, I saw my 500th plate – how perfect is that?  To save those of you the trouble of doing long division in your head or searching for that little 4-function calculator in your junk drawer; that’s 83 plates per year (6.9 plates per month) or 1 plate spotted every 4.4 days.  For six years.  … I know, it is amazing isn’t it?

In case you wish to join in the fun, here are the basic rules:

1. Only passenger class licence plates from your current province of residence are valid spots (no vanity, commercial, fleet, diplomatic … plates) in Alberta, these plates are of the following form ABC-123 (or ABC-1234, coming this fall)*
2. Go about your day in your normal fashion, excepting only a hardly noticeable scanning back and forth to get a glimpse of the licence plate on every car you encounter.
3. When you spot 000, congratulations! You’ve started!  (You may actually be in denial at this point, but don’t worry – eventually you will see 001 and you’ll be off.)
4. You must actually see each sought-after number with your own eyes and clearly enough that you won’t be wracked with pangs of guilt in the middle of the night for taking credit for seeing a plate that you’re just not sure about.
5. If you don’t have a steel-trap memory for the locations of upcoming plates you can jot them down or add them to a list in your Blackberry, but you actually have to physically lay eyes on the right plate in the right order.  It doesn’t matter that the blue minivan with 057 was there just yesterday…
6. Cruising parkades or parking lots is allowed, but don’t go bragging about it at work, some people might not understand that you are on a Quest.
7. Seeing the number after the one you want (repeatedly) builds mental toughness.  Quit complaining.

Have fun and repeat after me, “No! I don’t have Asperger’s, why do you ask?”

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* There is some debate on how this will affect the rules, but the concensus seems to be that only the last 3 of the 4 digits will count.  …and that the game could be extended to be multi-generational if you try to get all the plates from 000 through 9999.  (That’s a total of 11000 plates to spot: 000 – 999 plus 0000-9999) Not only that, but it has taken the province 25 years to run out of 3 digit plates, so the lifespan of the 4 digit plates will approach 10x as long (well not really, the plates are used at a far faster rate in 2009 than in the 80’s as the population has increased, but still…)

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