Sunday, February 11, 2007

Lights and Sirens, part 2

Maybe I had this coming for previously mentioning that I have never been pulled over by a police officer. However, I think it had nothing to do with my speeding last night, but rather my friend's bad luck. This guy has the worst luck of anyone I've ever met. He is very smart and conscientious about caring for his patients. However, a while back he got in some BIG trouble with administration about a confidentiality issue. The next month he had the mishap with a procedure, in spite of being supervised by multiple attendings. I am sure all of us will eventually run into the sorts of things that he is, but he just seems to be hitting them all at once. Maybe I'll ban him from riding in my car.

One of our friends is in the middle of a breakup, so we were at her house for moral support. I was very tired and was almost at his house to drop him off when I saw the lights in my rearview mirror. The officer informed me that I was going 41 in a 30 mph zone, but that he mainly pulled me over because I have tinted windows on my car. Huh? Then he said something about how they were just stopping a lot of people at that time of night to make sure nobody was drinking. So I had to do a bunch of counting backwards and dexterity tests with my hands... which I passed, in case you were wondering. Fun stuff.

So now I'm confused. Is it ok to speed as long as you don't have tinted windows? And my windshield is not even tinted. The rest of the windows have a light tint which was ok back home, but apparently is not a good thing here.

4 comments:

~~Silk said...

Police can't stop cars for no reason. They can stop ALL cars at a checkpoint, but if they want to stop random cars, they can do so only for a legitimate reason. Sounds like he was just casting about for some reason.

If your car passed NYS inspection, your tinting is probably light enough, but it still makes some cops nervous, especially at night (and not without cause...).

~~Silk said...

BTW, "back home" you have #SUN#!!! and heat (if my guess is right), so tinting has a legitimate purpose. Up here, tinting most often means you're hiding something.

Anonymous said...

I pulled into the theater and left my hazards on while I checked the times. When I came back to my car the security guard was writing me a parking ticket. I said in my most distraught voice, "Please sir, i've already had a long night . . . ." He looked at me and with the sternest voice he could muster (he couldn't have been more than 19), "You really shouldn't leave your car in the middle of the road." It's a good thing I was not sarcastic at the time or I would have shot back, "The middle of the road is 10 feet away from my car." I was glad that he didn't feel like finishing that ticket, though, so I wasn't going to quibble about parting shots.

RYC: My dad would have had a lot of stories about that car; he loved it like it was his long lost son. It got 12 miles to the gallon, I think. It was some kind of atrocious number like that. It was a tank, really.

Anonymous said...

ryc: it's been a long week. and it's only tuesday!