Getting Pulled Over

At least the cop was cute

I decided to drive into work on a Saturday morning to put in a couple hours when I could focus undisturbed. I took the Phaeton just to give it some exercise, and because it would make a nice drive on a Saturday morning. My drive to the office begins with country roads. The first leg had me hampered behind some bozo going slowly and not maintaining a consistent speed. When it became apparent that this was going to persist on the second leg, I put my foot in it and let the Phaeton whisk me past him when I hit the first passing zone. I love this car. All was well until I was approaching the intersection that marks the start of the third leg, and came upon someone who was moseying. There happened to be a passing zone right there on the approach to the intersection, so I gave the accelerator a squeeze and sped by him. I "stopped" at the intersection, and sped towards the next intersection, where the traffic light had a lovely green left-arrow shining at me, allowing me to keep my foot in it and slalom through the turn like it's the Senna S's.

The third leg involved going through a sketchy little hamlet called Varna. The rally driving was behind me by then. I was just cruising through comfortably with no bozos in front of me and enjoying the ride. But just as I'm hitting the climb up the little hill and and on to Cornell, I see a cop in the mirror with his lights flashing. I immediately pull over, hoping he's just going to zoom past to whatever he needs to get to. Nope. He pulls behind me and I come to a full stop. It was in a really bad spot, on an uphill grade with a tiny shoulder and a drainage ditch that kept me still half out in the lane. But hey, those lights come on and I stop. If he didn't want me to stop there he could have just followed me to the straight away at the top of the hill and THEN hit the lights. But if he's turning them on, then I'm stopping.

I wait patiently with my hands on the wheel, but he's not getting out of the car. I keep waiting as I try to remember where I keep the registration in this car. When you have 10 vehicles on the road, it can be tough to keep them straight. I was about to go fishing for it, but I know not to do that, so he doesn't think I'm going for a gun or something. I just keep my hands on the wheel while I wait. And wait. I look closely. It's a state trooper. And he's taking his time coming up to talk to me. Cars are going past this precarious situation, veering out into the oncoming lane on a blind hill, and sometimes having to stop to wait for oncoming traffic.

Finally the guy gets out and walks up to me. I'm checking him out in the side mirror. Young fella. White boy. Kinda small sized for a police officer. He gets up to the window. He's kinda cute in a geeky sort of way. Again, not what you expect for a police officer. I roll the window down and put my hands back on the wheel.

"Good morning, sir," he says politely. "Do you know why I pulled you over?" I like this kid. He's very matter-of-fact and unassuming. Sort of like the kid next door, but with a badge. His teeth are pearly white and he's got a nice smile. In another situation I'd want to chat him up.

"Uhhh," I say, trying to match his unassuming tenor. I was playing around with facial hair at that time, and basically looked like an 1890's prospector, made worse by the fact that I'd been letting the whiskers grow out. And here I am in a VW Phaeton, which he probably doesn't even appreciate what it was. "I may have been going just a bit fast...?" I say sheepishly.

"Do you know what the speed limit is?" he asked.

"Thirteeeeeeeeee..... five?" I offer up, knowing full well it's 30 in Varna. No one ever goes 30 through there. Never. I'd been making that drive long enough that I knew it used to be a 45mph speed zone along this very same stretch. The only thing that changed was the speed limit sign. When they lowered it to 30mph it became a favored spot for cops to pull people over like shooting fish in a barrel, but usually I saw them early enough to slow down. I didn't know where this guy had been hiding.

"Do you know how fast you were going?" he asked. I honestly didn't. I wasn't looking at the speedometer. I wasn't flying, I know that much. But I knew I wasn't going 30. I stammered a little, but he didn't wait for a reply. "I clocked you at 50," he said.

I made that face like you're saying "Ooooooh" and kind of squint and wince at the same time, like when you see someone hit their thumb with a hammer. "I'm sorry," I said. "I was just, er..."

"Where you in a hurry?" he asked. He wasn't being bullying or condemning like cops sometimes are. It was more like he was telling me what were you thinking.

"No," I said. I wanted to say when you're in a car like a Phaeton, it's so smooth and silky, with power in such effortless abundance that you just don't realize how fast you're going. But that's not the kind of thing you say to a guy who is about to write you a ticket. "Just having a nice ride. I guess." I say as contritely as I can.

"Where're you going?" he asked.

"In to work," I said, "to put in a couple quiet hours on a Saturday morning."

"Where do you work?"

"At Cornell," I say gesturing just up the road.

"So you come through here all the time."

"Mmhmm."

"So then you should know what the speed limit is."

I was so defeated at this point. Again, he wasn't badgering me. It was almost like an Andy Griffith moment where the geeky kid quietly and politely played logical checkers with me until he had me dead to rights. I dropped my head as I nodded, saying, "Yes, I should know..." It was a naked confession. It was almost comical by this time.

He was still being really cool. He took my license and registration. He asked me if there was anything wrong with the car, which there wasn't. Inspection, registration and insurance all good. He asked me if any warrants or anything was going to come up for me, and I said no. He went back to the car. I waited patiently again. I was actually wondering if he might let me off with a warning. I'm never that lucky, but everything was so chill that I thought this might be the time.

The wait you have to endure when a cop is writing you a ticket is one of the worst kinds of waiting. You have to sit there while car after car drives past, each one of them making sure to get a look and judge you. All you can do is watch the cop in the rear view mirror and wonder what kind of fate he's about to hand you. I'm not sure if it's bad form to play on your phone in this situation, but I didn't want to find out the hard way, so I just sat there and meditated. At least the wait isn't as long in these days of information networks and portable printing. They used to have to fill the form out in long hand which took ages and ages.

It wasn't too long before the kid was walking back up to the car. He did write me a ticket, but not for speeding. "I'm giving you a break on the speeding," he said, "so I wrote you up for having your license plate partially obscrued by the license plate frame."

I couldn't believe it. Having a LICENSE PLATE FRAME? I give him this look of RUFKM???

He almost snickered. "Technically," he said, "you can't have anything on top of any part of the license plate. And it's better than getting cited for 50 in a 30."

I couldn't argue with that. I knew he was giving me a big break. "Well thank you," I said. "I apreciate it." I meant it. As ridiculous as it was to get a ticket for having a license plate frame, I did appreciate that he didn't write me up for going 20 miles over the limit.

The irony was I didn't have a front plate on that car. If he had been looking for an alternative to speeding, that would have been a lot better than a license plate frame. But he didn't even notice that. Most of my cars don't have front plates, and I've never gotten a hassle about it.

As the cop got back in his car and I was putting the citation away, I started picturing myself standing before the judge. I never mail it in. I always appear. But to come to court for an offence as trival as having a license plate frame, something that a huge portion of the driving public does, I could picture the judge seeing it, looking at me dumbfounded, and asking, "Okay, what REALLY happened?" That would put me in the position to actually plead the 5th in a court of law.

The ultimat satisfaction I would get out of the whole escapade was that the cash I would use to pay the ticket would be coming out of my drug money.

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