The wall of sample license plates

Five plates hang together at the county office, none of them valid, all of them stamped SAMPLE across the top in a font no real plate has ever used. Two follow the current state design, one carries a slogan retired two governors ago, one hangs a few degrees off level, and one has been there long enough that its bolt holes have started to rust orange around the edges before the rust reaches the plate itself. The wall exists to show a visitor what a completed plate should look like: correct spacing, correct mounting height, correct bolt placement, none of which a first-time applicant reliably achieves on the first attempt. Older counties keep specimens from redesigns three cycles back, retired now from the road but not from the wall, since demonstrating the wrong plate is nearly as useful as demonstrating the right one. The crooked plate, hanging visibly off level, has been observed level exactly zero times across several visits, which argues either for a maintenance oversight or a very small, very specific joke that nobody working there will confirm. Visitors rarely look at the wall directly. They glance at it once on the way to a numbered ticket dispenser and rarely again, the way a person glances at a fire extinguisher, registering its presence without absorbing its content. The plates themselves, retired from actual traffic, still do the one job assigned to them: showing, correctly, where the bolts go.

H. G. Plimsoll