Two Feet Tall, Ten Thousand Little Failures

A person noticed, years later, that their driver’s license listed their height as 2’0” instead of 5’7”. Two feet tall. Toddler territory. The laugh is immediate and pure (and the Reddit thread obliges with jokes and image macros), but the real joy for the system-minded mind is less the comedy and more the inevitability: a little human input, a leaky interface, and an incentive structure that makes nonsense both possible and invisible. I mean, right? A government document that looks authoritative but contains a child’s stature—what could go wrong besides everything?

Think about the incentives. The person at the DMV is paid to process transactions quickly; the database is designed to accept inputs with minimal friction; and the customer wants a card that says “you can drive,” not “your height is epidemiologically accurate.” Numbers on the card are low-signal social glue rather than high-stakes facts. The photo, the name, the expiration date—those are what we actually care about in practice. So an improbable height value is both cheap to produce and expensive to dispute. Who’s going to argue about inches if the barcode scans and the face looks right? (Not much of an incentive for anyone to check.)

Then there’s the software and UX layer: forms that allow December 0 as a birthdate; birth certificates with mislabeled genders; validation that stops at “is this a legal-looking string?” rather than “does this correspond to plausible human biology?” The system is optimized for throughput and local consistency—not for cross-referencing ontology of human features. If the downstream checks are built around identity confirmation by picture and name, numeric plausibility checks are an extra cost with little benefit. So you get a world in which a clerical typo becomes an enduring artifact, preserved by inertia and the comfortable assumption that the institution must be right.

There’s also the social story: we outsource trust to institutions and then act surprised when their optimizations don’t match our desire for metaphysical accuracy. The commenter who said “You been selling yourself short all these years” captured both the humor and the psychology: we treat state-issued numbers as social signals of selfhood (and sometimes of self-worth), even when those numbers are functionally irrelevant. The thing survives because correcting it takes effort, and unless your career depends on being measured in feet and inches, it’s a problem that doesn’t move the needle. Which is to say: bureaucracies evolve to minimize pain inside the machine, not to produce Platonic truth for every citizen.

So yes, the license is now a charming bit of bureaucratic surrealism—part authority, part sticker on a Lego man. It’s a reminder that systems reflect priorities: we’ve built fast, forgiving processes that prioritize identity resolution over empirical correctness. If you want something fixed, you need to change the incentives (or file a form and wait in line). Otherwise, enjoy being two feet tall on paper—there are worse ways to be famous. [^1] [^2]

[^1]: The Reddit thread is full of similar data-quality pathologies—people find birthdates like “December 0” or gender entries that don’t match expectation—classic signs of weak validation and heavy trust in human operators. [^2]: “Selling yourself short” was an actual commenter quip; it’s a delightful piece of incidental poetry about social signaling and self-image, which bureaucrats accidentally rewrite when they mistype a number.