Forms Form Factors.

I live in California.  There are three documents you need to have on you when pulled over by a cop, license, proof of insurance, and the registration of the car.  Like most people I keep them in my wallet.  And that sucks.

It's bad enough that they aren't the same size.  Their dimensions aren't even integer multiples of each other.  My drivers license is the same size as a credit card.  That has been the case with every other one I've seen, whatever the state, whatever the country.  And, for some reason, the dimensions are odd in both Imperial and Metric (3 3/8", 86mm X 2 1/8", 54mm).  Why couldn't they have made it 3" X 2" or 85mm X 35mm?  You could fit all the information in there.  But I digress.

Let's just call the current dimensions W and H.  My proof of insurance is 1.21W X 2.22H, with plenty of white space (it is actually pink paper but pink space is a weird term.).  It could easily be made W X 2H with all the room needed for the required information.  My registration is even worse at  2.49W X 2.57H.  With even more white space.  There is a 6" bar code along the top.  I've never seen it scanned.  My reader couldn't, probably because it's been damaged from being folded up to fit it in my wallet, which is the case with almost everybody's.  The back has a bunch of address and phone numbers that everyone would go to the internet to get before looking at their registration.  So, using the back and skipping the unreadable bar code, all the information could put on a W X 2H form as well.

But NoooOOOoooOOOOoo.  For some reason the DMV and Insurance companies just pulled some random sizes out of their asses.

For this reason the employees who made those decisions and their bosses, all the way up, are on The List.