Urban Fiction: Living it Out - Day Three: A New Beginning

As a keeper of the peace, and an enforcer of the laws of my city, I take great pride in the carrying out of my duties. I work the graveyard shift, so I’m a creature of the night. Checking dark alleys and suspicious vehicles and persons….Cars driving in locations where they should not be, mysterious persons in dark clothing ducking in and out of dead end streets…these are all par for the course as I patrol my assigned area.

So, can you imagine my chagrin when at zero dark: thirty… that’s police talk for in the middle of the night… I make a traffic stop, turn around to go back to my unit only to find that my police car is missing a headlight. Oops!

That’s like a Knight of the Round Table finding that his steed is missing a front leg. Well not quite, but you get the picture. What do you do? Do you give yourself a ticket for failure to maintain equipment? I know some people wish I would, but no. Actually, I took it back to the barn and put it away with a maintenance request attached. I said all that to say this, sometimes we officers may stop you to let you know that you have equipment that is malfunctioning. Sometimes a person really might not know.

Now, if you ever hear of someone being stopped for an equipment malfunction and then they somehow wound up in jail...I’m here to tell you that that someone just didn’t know when to just shut up. There is a thing called talking yourself into trouble. So for the guy who was riding his bicycle during the hours of darkness without a headlight and he wound up in jail…well I guess you see it, he just didn’t know when to shut up. I find myself wondering what Nate Richards would have done in this situation.

So, if the cop stops you and says he just wanted to give you a warning that you needed to fix this or adjust that, it might be better to just say thank you. Just saying.