by Nick Osaada

Created on: December 01, 2008

In these heady times of feel-good lawsuits and illiterate internet communication, there's nothing quite like a police officer to make your modern man feel like little Billy caught with his grubby hands round Leslie's pigtails. (Girls with pigtails are always Leslie. If I could explain it, I would.)

By now you probably know the drill; that sinking feeling as you hear the siren and see those calliope-esque little lights pulsing a snide little tattoo off your mirrors. You can certainly recall the dry-mouthed shame as you pull over onto the shoulder, watching enviously as all the brighter kids in the class zoom along their gleeful ways unimpeded. But that's not all, of course. You are still compelled to sit there diffidently as uniformed Teacher does the Walk in order to reach you.

The Walk is an integral couple of years of academy training; it communicates so much more than the fact that the police officer is not paralyzed from the waist down. The Walk conveys the man's moral high ground in all aspects of life; he became an officer of the law while you wasted your college years as an English major; he sticks his neck out to defend his town from all evil while you eat M&M's off your chest and watch CSI; he can actually hear the voices of the adorable children and pets that you endanger with your driving while you gallivant merrily about, shooting puppies and clubbing baby seals. He is In the Right.

Then, once you have endeavored to roll down your window in what you hope is the least threatening manner possible, there comes the Question.

"Do you know why I pulled you over?"

Panic! Is there a right answer to this question, little Billy wonders. If you DO know, then why did you do it? If you don't know, perhaps telling Teacher that would only prove that you have no internal checking system for your dangerously manic driving tendencies. So you throw up a clever smoke screen.

"Um, I guess I might have been speeding only I don't THINK I was speeding and, um, if I was it was very dangerous of course but I know I wasn't and wow, this has never happened to me before."

You're positive that your cunning little addendum there will somehow exonerate you. EVERYONE thinks that'll work, as though professing that you've never been pulled over will cause Teacher to relax, smile, tousle your hair and give you a lollipop. Your newness to the dark world of automobilian sin will surely touch the hardened officer's heart, you assure yourself.

It doesn't.

"License and registration," he deadpans,

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