It’s always the small things that trip you up. For the Unabomber, some of the words in his manifesto made family members think he might be the guy. For the shoe bomber, it was the burning fuses sticking out of his sneakers. For me, it was the burned out tail light on my car that led to the unraveling of my months long criminal rampage.
Yes, last month an over alert police officer noted my burned out light, and then apparently looked up my vehicle registration and found that it was expired since JULY! When he pulls me over, he seemed ready to drop me if I made any sudden move, so I decides to play nice and cooperate. And then he discovers my vehicle insurance card is out of date. 3 – THREE! – tickets, and not even for speeding.
If I was in Los Angeles, I might have shot the cop, as I hears it’s easier to beat a murder rap then a traffic ticket out there. But here in Wisconsin, if you kill someone, bad things will happen to you, and you won’t even get a book deal. And, well, I didn’t have a gun, but that’s beside the point.
So I turns on the charm. Everything was, “Yes, Officer” and “I didn’t realize, Officer”, while inside my guts were churning at the humiliation of toadying to The Man. I ended up with $98 of tickets and a “Have a good evening” as the departing insult of the jackbooted thing.
So I calls my mouthpiece when I get home, who says, “Pay the ticket. or nuke the city hall to eliminate the computer records”. And though I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a tactical nuke for my man cave, it seemed pretty wasteful to set it off right away just to wipe out some computer records, especially when the fallout would likely contaminate my own house. And I thinks to myself, “I’ll save the nuke for a time when I get a ticket while I’m out of state.”
But I had a better idea to beat the tickets anyway. I renewed the plates, got the light fixed, dug up the current insurance card, and headed for my court appearance. The plan was to fool them into believing I was a law abiding citizen by abiding by the law.
It worked! I didn’t even have to appear in the courtroom. The city cleark heard my story, called the prosecutor over (who was preparing his cases for later in the evening), and we did a deal without bothering a judge with the details. My tickets got knocked down to $10 and no points, and I walked away a free man! My only regret was not seeing if Night Court was anything like the TV show I used to love. The prosecutor did kind of look like a cross between Dan Fielding and Herb Tarlick. When my registration expires again later in the year, watch out!
