The Idiots Who Run the Asylum

In my previous life as an airport shuttle driver, I set out for work at the crack one Saturday morning.  Mine was the only car on the Bayway, it appeared, and although I wasn't running late I nevertheless was generous with my foot pressure on the go pedal.

Turns out I wasn't the only car pointed in my direction.  The other one was hidden behind some landscaping in the median.  As I went by at about warp factor six, in a stretch where the speed limit is 40 mph, the other car pulled out behind me, red and blue lights flashing.

My car at the time was a four-cylinder, five-plus-year-old Saturn.  Even if it had occurred to me to try, there was no way I was going to outrun a St Petersburg police cruiser.  I pulled over.

The cop approached, glanced at me through my rolled-down window, and a look of abject disappointment at once crossed his countenance and relaxed it stern features.  He clearly had thought he had bagged a DUI.

I never, ever, try to BS cops.  They've heard all the stories.  Besides, I've learned things go a lot easier if you 'fess up and take your lumps.  When you're caught with your hand in the cookie jar, well, as my German friend says, "What you can doing?"

The cop was almost apologetic when he told me that instead of writing a speeding ticket he would ticket me for "failure to obey a traffic control device."  The traffic control device was, he explained, the speed limit sign.  The difference betwen the two citations saved me about $80.  I was both grateful and appropriately contrite.

Not so Charles McBurney.  FHP trooper Charles Swindle (unfortunate name for a cop, but that's neither here nor there) pulled him over for doing 87 in a 70 mph zone.  My bugbot, on the way back from another mission, caught the conversation.

"You know who I am?" asked McBurney.

"Let me guess.  Speedy Gonzales?  Big Daddy Don Garlits?"

"I'm Florida State Representative Charles McBurney, and your name tag is going to read Barney Fife when I get through with you.  You hear, Chief Gillespie?"

"Tell you what, Chuck.  You being a political hack and all, let me check with my boss and see if we can't cut you some slack.  You just sit there in your car and harrumph and play with yourself a bit while I get on my radio, 'four?"

"I don't want any slack, Deputy Dawg.  I want no ticket at all!"

"You're in luck!  My boss says to give you a ticket for not having proof of insurance.  'Course, if it was up to me I'd cuff your arrogant little megalomanical ass, tip off the TV stations and let you do the perp walk in front of the cameras."

No one is more pompous or more vindictive than an outraged politician who fancies himself an omnipotent power broker on the order of a sentator in ancient Rome.

"I think it's disgraceful that a law enforcement officer would give me a break on a violation just because I'm a state representative,' McBurney complained to FHP Col David Brieton.  "What's going to become of us if lawbreakers like me are allowed to run rampant while in fear of little more than a slap on the wrist?  And besides, I had proof of insurance.  Wyatt Earp, there, never asked to see it."

That was Swindle's well-meaning mistake.  Instead of giving McBurney the $170 ticket he deserved, he wrote him a $10 one for something he didn't.

And that's what got him fired.