“Much procedures,” the man behind the desk at UniAsia Insurance mumbled after an hour of wrangling and wriggling and writhing in pain at the simple task of transferring car insurance from a friend to myself.

Much procedures indeed!

When nearing (what we thought was) completion, he handed a no-claims-discount paper to my friend so when they need to get insurance again in the future, they can get it at a reduced rate.

I thought – what about me? I just cancelled my insurance three weeks ago. Don’t I get a discount too?

I asked him.

“Where’s the NCD paper, like the one I gave her?”

“I didn’t get one,” I replied.

“Yes, you did,” he said.

“No, I didn’t,” I repeated.

“You must. If you cancel, you must have one.”

“I didn’t get one.”

“Who did you talk with in the office?”

“A Chinese lady. I don’t know her name.”

“Was she skinny?”

Hmmmm. Is this conversation going anywhere?

They find my cancelled policy and another hour later his remark “much procedures” accurately reflected my own thinking.

Insurance finally in hand, it’s off to JPJ – the DMV equivalent to transfer ownership of the car. When we arrived, we are told which forms to fill out, which we do, get out queue number and wait for our turn. Our turn finally came, and we found ourselves standing in front of a Chinese lady. She was rather slim.

She looked over the paperwork and finally said, “Where’s the inspection form?”

“Huh?”

“You didn’t have your car inspected?”

“We have to get our car inspected?”

“Yes.”

“Really? We’ve never done that before.”

“You must.”

“Can we take it anyplace to get it inspected?”

“No, you have to go to Puspakom.”

That’s not helpful.

“What?”

“Puspakom.”

“What?”

“You ask out there. They give you phone number and address in Batu Muang.”

Batu Muang. On the far end of the island. We are basically dead.

As we left her counter, I looked again and wondered if she had recently been fired from UniAsia.

The man at the JPJ desk gives us Puspakom’s number. He says to call and make an appointment or we waste a lot of time.

‘Oh, you mean like here,’ I commented in my head.

We left. I called. No answer. No answer. No answer.

What  was Puspakom? I had no idea. But I determined that it was the only car inspection place on a small island of 1,000,000 people. Made total sense to me.

So we navigated the 45 minute ride to Batu Muang, and using Google maps and my Samsung cell phone (thank you!) we found it.

An inspection chop-shop. Where you can’t make an appointment. Just drive right up and get in the car queue. We did. We waited. We paid some more. We waited until the paper work came out. The results were in Bahasa Malay:

LULUS

We really hoped that meant PASS.

Now we were running against the clock. With JPJ closing at 4:30, we had to move. Luckily, the car I was buying had some good pick-up in the engine.

Back to JPJ, another queue number, another wait. A system wide computer malfunction. More waiting. More money. Finally – FINISHED.

I bought a car. I started at 9:30 and finished shortly after 5:00PM. All in all a profitable day.

For someone not named me.