Page 94 - NIXBOOK

I pulled a guy over for violation of the high-occupancy vehicle lane restrictions; he was driving solo. I asked him why. He thought
saying “I’m going to work” was a valid, legit excuse to use the carpool lane. It, uh, totally was not.

Gas station owner calls 911 to report vandalism. Somebody, without good reason, had hit the emergency fuel shut off button and
it caused all the gas pumps to stop working. As it should. It was then that the owner realized the key to reset the system was not
in the gas station anywhere; the nearest one was several hours away. During which time he lost several dozen customers. He
looked on the video system and saw the suspect, a teenage girl, who had hit the button on a whim apparently. He got her license
plate and I tracked her down. She was very apologetic and I sympathized with her; she didn’t have any malice when she hit the
button, and certainly didn’t mean for the pumps to shut down all day. She agreed to settle a civil case with the owner and
compensate him for his lost revenue. I can’t offer legal advice to people so kept my mouth shut. Otherwise I would have told
her that she owned him nothing since he was the one who didn’t have the key to quickly reset the pumps back to an operational
status.

I’m taking a guy to jail for something, I can’t remember what now but I know I had a good reason. This was around 1994. As we
get to the edge of town he sees his father driving by and he convinces me to stop so he can say goodbye to his dad and let him
know he’s going to jail. Like an idiot, I oblige and stop in a parking lot and we tell the old man that son is going to jail. The dad
puffs himself up, looks me in the eye and announces “You are not taking my son to jail.” I then realize I’ve put myself in a bad
situation. “Okay, sir, we’ll talk about in just a minute…let me go back to my car…and…” from a backwards walk I turn into a run,
jump into my ’88 Plymouth Gran Fury, and peel out of there. Dad was all bark and no bite I guess because he chose not to follow
after me. My policy ever since then has been to not stop, and just go directly to jail.

A new house is being built in a neighborhood. The construction workers are actually high school kids from the high school
woodshop class, supervised by the shop teacher. They’re doing a pretty good job, building an actual whole house. One day, as
all the kids are in the back pounding nails and making walls, two of the boys decided they’ll fix their problems with each other
by duking it out in the front of the house, away from everybody else. They go out front and start trading blows. Neighbor across
the street sees what’s going on and he goes over to stop them. It was the .38 revolver tucked into waistband that really caught
their attention, in addition to his proclamation about “No violence in this neighborhood!”