After about 30 years of safe driving, I got a ticket. I loathe driving in New York City, but like any father your children bat their eyes or give you the, “It’s okay Tatty, I will just take the train,” you have this vision of your children braving the cold, lugging their heavy bags through mud.
I took my car to the “Heights,” which is funny because as a Chabadsker I usually mean Crown Heights. For YU parents that’s Washington Heights. There was a ton of traffic on the street and I made a left not knowing that on 186th and St. Nicholas, one can’t turn left. The police pull me over and I didn’t even have a response as I haven’t received a ticket in forever.
I made some calls to lawyers I know. They all said in New York City it’s rare to get the ticket resolved. Reaching out to social media I was told about an app called WINIT. You can download the app free from the Google Play store. The process is pretty interesting; you scan your ticket, tell your side, then hit submit. Then an attorney is assigned but you can choose from different law firms. You are asked to select a price that you will pay the attorney to resolve your case, and if you lose you get your money back. I had nothing to lose.
The point is, I needed to take care of this ticket for my flawless driving record, and having to go to the city multiple times, wait out the case for months and hire an attorney, the ticket cost in time might have been higher than the penalty. With WINIT, the attorney takes care of everything, even going to court. I am not a traffic attorney and my offense was a minor one. While I had a good experience, please consult with your local attorney before going to WINIT.
If any of us have the honor to go to a local post office to pick up stamps or a certified letter, the USPS experience has gotten better, but it is still time consuming. Recently, I had to send a certified letter to a company. The thought of having to wait in line and pay just to send a certified letter was daunting. Of course, you can go to stamps.com and get a subscription. I found a great company for this exact purpose: LetterStream.com.
With LetterStream.com, you can send mailings, certified letters and other old-school mailings. What is really convenient is you upload the signed documents. They can be PDFs or Word docs, all with a cover letter. You pay with a credit card. Every step of the way LetterStream.com sends you updates and a USPS tracking number. The cost is about $2 more than going to the post office. LetterStream.com is 24/7, so no need to wait in line!
Signing a PDF is something users have to do for most forms these days. You can print the PDF, scan it, then attach it to an email. But an amazing website is www.pdffiller.com. The sites allows you to upload any document even if it’s not native to PDF. The upload feature is free; some of the options like emailing or having the PDFs that you signed held on their cloud space do require a very nominal yearly fee. The convenience can’t be beat. You upload the PDF, one can sign the PDF in “free hand” using the mouse or a touch screen or you can use the built-in signature app. This website is a must-have for anyone who has had to sign PDFs as much as I have. Www.pdffiller.com is again one of those websites that takes the snail method and makes it digital.
A funny little family thing is having children growing up with tech. When my 13-year-old daughter’s smartphone died, she had to wait a grueling three days to get a used one on Ebay. During that long period she had no phone. At this point, I may write a column on the value or need for a landline, which isn’t really land anyway, it’s digital! I know it seem ridiculous; the only calls we get are endless sales calls, which we never pick up. Most schools will call the parents’ cell phones rather than a landline. (The only reason I need a landline is so I can call my cell phone if I can’t find it!) So my daughter sees the portable and asks if she can take it to get pizza with her friend. She had no concept that phones used to be limited to the home. My wife and I chuckled over this as my daughter, who is very tech- and street-smart, truly had no idea what a landline is.
As we conclude the holiday of Chanukah, hopefully everyone had a chance to see all the menorah lightings around the area. But if the weather didn’t allow it; you should know chabad.org brings in extra servers and internet lines to facilitate the worldwide menorah lightings. They just can’t be beat.
By Shneur Garb
Shneur Garb is the founder and CEO of the Garb I.T. Consulting Group. Send comments or questions to [email protected].
