"Speed Crap" by Troy H. Cheek on Feb 04, 2008
I refuse to write today out of solidarity with my brothers and sisters on strike in Hollywood as a show of my unflinching support of universal creators' rights.
Hah! Fooled you! I believe that if creators aren't getting paid enough, the blame rests primarily on the creators. I say that because if I were offered a book deal or a movie script rewrite or the opportunity to pitch a new TV series, I'd jump at the chance and do the job for peanuts just to get my foot in the door. So would every other would-be, wanna-be, and has-been writer in the world. If there are plenty of newcomers willing to do the job for free, why would anyone be so stupid as to pay a bundle to have someone else do the job? Sure, you're willing to pay extra for someone with a good reputation, known good quality, name suitable for dropping, but you also have a budget that needs minding.
Put it this way: Think of any product or service you currently enjoy. Now, imagine someone comes along and says "I'm starting a new company and I need name recognition. Choose me and I'll give you the same product for so cheap that it will seem free compared to your current provider." Oh, you scoff, but I see people willing to drive over each other to save three cents per gallon of gasoline, so don't tell me that people will even think of brand loyalty if the new kid is selling for half price.
I had no intention of writing the above, but I just happened upon my opening line in the webcomic Dork Tower and thought it so funny that I just had to steal it. The punchline was that a character said that, but he was really suffering from writer's block.
Me, I've had a bit of a block myself. Luckily, every time I hit a block, something comes along to spur me into writing.
Take, for example, what happened to me at 3:30 one morning not too long ago.
I don't generally drive through town on my way to work, as that exposes me to a few more intersections, an extra traffic signal, and lower speed limits. I suspect that I could actually save a mile or three (or a few kilometers if I were living in Germany) by driving through town, but staying out in the country gives me one long (if a bit indirect) shot that ultimately takes less driving time. Unfortunately, until banks start installing ATMs along gravel roads, I'll have to go into town for money.
I was doublechecking my money count, one eye on the bills and one eye on the speedometer, as I drove out of town. I don't have to watch the road because the truck knows the way better than I do. I do have to watch the money because I only have 24 hours to report shortages to the bank, which is a whole other story. I do have to watch the speedometer because this town is notorious for its speed traps.
Of course, no town will ever admit to having a speed trap, any more than any police department will ever admit to having ticket quotas for its officers. Still, I dislike driving through any small town towards the end of a month because, curiously enough, that just seems to be the most likely time that I see flashing blue lights everywhere.
That was why I was travelling down a completely empty four lane road (with additional turn only lane in center) in the middle of the night at a blistering pace of 40 miles per hour. I breathed a sigh of relief when I hit the city limits and, just a hundred feet down the road, passed the sign that gave me permission to recklessly increase my speed to a heartpounding 45.
I was still wiping the sweat from my brow when the blue lights came on.
I refused to panic and pulled over, thinking that maybe this was a false alarm like the last twenty or thirty times when I just happened to be on the road when the officer behind me got an urgent call requiring his assistance elsewhere. At least, that's the official excuse. I think they hit the blue lights sometimes just to see people jump. I know I would. That's probably why I'm not a cop. That's probably also why I don't carry a gun.
I pulled over and waited while the deputy (couldn't be the city police because we were outside the city limts) woke up dispatch and ran my license plate. This always makes me nervous, as a neighbor and distant relative hit senility about the year I was born and hasn't quite gotten it through her head that my grandmother is dead and wouldn't mind me driving her truck, hence leading to threats to calling the police to report it stolen every time she sees me in it. At least she's stopped shooting at me.
I must have come back clean, as the officer didn't have his gun drawn when he approached. I already had my license and proof of insurance sitting out where I could get to them. The local gendarmes did draw weapons on my mother once when she reached into her purse to get her license, which she thought odd because they had just demaned that she produce said license.
I rolled down the window. "Can I do something wrong for you, officer?"
"What?" was Officer Fassace's brilliant comeback. Apparently, my driving through town had woken him up, too. That's not his real name, by the way.
I'm entirely too clever for my own good, but do sometimes belately realize when taking off the smartass hat is a good thing. "What can I do for you, officer?" I said in my most helpful tone. I also may have said it slowly and enunciating each word as if I was repeating what I had said earlier word for word instead of taking an entirely new approach.
"Sir, do you realize that you were going 55 miles per hour in a 40 zone?"
I glanced down at the speedometer, feeling as if it had betrayed me. No, if it was that far off, I would have noticed long before now. "Actually, I thought I was going about 45 and I thought-"
"I need to see your license and proof of... Oh, thank you. Wait here." He may have cut me off before I could mention that I didn't accelerate to 45 until after I left the 40 miles per hour stretch of road, but I shut him up by having the required paperwork ready before he asked.
That probably irritated him, now that I think of it.
He returned shortly. "I cut you a break because you seem like a nice guy and had the honesty to admit you were doing 45, so I wrote the ticket up as 46 instead of 55. That will cut your fine in half and make for fewer points on your driving record. Sign here."
"I don't think I should sign since I disagree with almost everything you just said."
"Your signature is not an admission of guilt. It just means that I've explained the citation and your court date." Of course, he hadn't mentioned the court date until then. I'm almost certain he said the 30th, though the citation says the 19th. The 30th couldn't be right, though, because unless I totally misrember the "30 days hath September" song,
It wasn't until after I drove off, carefully keeping it under 45 until I hit the 55 sign, that I glanced at the ticket and noticed that he had been a city police officer after all. I hadn't noticed which uniform was under that coat he was wearing. He probably hadn't seen my uniform, either, though he might have called me "officer" at some time. I couldn't recall clearly because I was still in shock that an admission of driving 45 in a 45 zone had gotten me accused of speeding at 55 and ultimately a ticket for 46 in a 40.
I honestly don't believe that I'd been anywhere near 55 since I'd come into the other side of town. The route I drove goes 55, 45, 35, 40, 45, then back to 55. I had come to a complete stop at the ATM in the middle of the 40 zone. Given the acceleration of an 89 Chevy truck on a sub-freezing morning, I'm not sure how I could have hit 55 before the edge of town by accident.
I will admit that at one point the officer did offer to let me look at the radar unit in his patrol car. I declined because I know how to fake a speed on one, unless it's a very expensive and very new model which includes a video recorder and timestamp. Local law enforcement doesn't like to use those, officially because they are too expensive and prone to failure. Unofficially, because you can't fake a speed on one.
As I drove on to work quietly talking to myself, I found three problems with the citation:
I wasn't sure about #1 but thought it was certainly worth investigating if a city police officer had any authority to ticket someone outside the city limits or even be outside the city limits when on duty in the first place. I figured #2 was because, if memory serves, the fine for being 0-5 miles per hour over the speed limit is $0, so he had to make it at least 6 or he wouldn't be bringing in any money. (That's not a typo, by the way. I do remember reading somewhere that 0 miles over the speed limit is technically speeding. If the sign says 55, you're supposed to stay at 54.9999999999... or lower. It's a limit in the mathematical sense, in that you can approach it but never reach it.) Good ol' #3 is what really ticked me off and was, by my estimation, the best way to get out of the ticket. Well, correcting the ticket to 46 in a 45 zone made it 1 mph over and zero fine and zero points on the driving record.
Then I saw that while the citation was written for 46, the officer had put "(55)" right above it. In my little mind, I saw the officer telling the judge "Your Honor, I tried to be nice and give this guy a break, but my note here clearly shows that I clocked him doing 55, so even if he was in a 45 zone at the time, he was still speeding."
All this kept me on a slow burn all day. I hope I didn't take it out on any customers. I did bring it up to my boss during the annual performance appraisal which happened to fall on that day. "I'm not going to apologize for being a few minutes late some mornings, boss, seeing as most of the time you have me clocking in hours before my shift is officially supposed to begin. I got a speeding ticket this morning trying to get to work on time."
Technically, that was a lie, as I'd already decided I would be a few minutes late and wasn't driving any faster than usual. I believe it is better to be a few minutes late than drive aggressively and possibly never get to your destination at all. The boss admitted that he and some of his buddies had also gotten speeding tickets in that same small town.
As it was nominally daylight during the drive home, I decided to retrace my route from that morning to see exactly where the city limits sign was and exactly where the 45 mph sign was in relation to where Officer Fassace had clocked me. I figured I'd come back on the next sunny day and take pictures of everything as evidence come the 30th or 19th or whenever my day in court. As I approached town from the opposite direction, I was surprised to see that several hundred feet before I was expecting the sign telling me to slow down from 55 to 45 was a sign that said the speed limit was 40 miles per hour. I squawked like a plucked chicken and hit the brakes.
This caused great distress to the Snyder Hunt International Trucking (the name is too long so they just use the initials) driver behind me, as he obviously wasn't expecting to have to slow to 40 in the middle of an uphill climb, either. I heard him jake brake for roughly three seconds, just long enough for us to reach the "no jake brake" sign, but that was long enough to keep me from becoming his new hood ornament. I could see in the rearview mirror that his mouth was moving, though. I'm sure I would have learned some new words had I been in the cab there with him.
I was hyper alert as I approached the location of the 55-down-to-45 sign I had been expecting. It also said 40 miles per hour. Seconds later, I saw another identical sign. Checking the side view mirror, I saw that the sign for the other direction, the one I passed this morning as I accelerated from 40 to 45 miles per hour, said 40 miles per hour instead of the 45 miles per hour I am certain I had seen in the past. I turned around and drove back out of town just to doublecheck all the signs.
Well, it's official. Without me noticing, they had extended the city limits a mile or so in that direction and had changed the speed limit to 40 miles per hour all the way to the edge of town. Not only was Officer Fassace still within his jurisdiction, but he was right that I was speeding. 46 is close enough to 45 that I can admit that my speedometer or my judgement might have been off by that much. In the guise of cutting me a break, the officer probably did exactly what he was supposed to do to begin with.
I am a hypocrite, which is not spelled like it sounds, but that's what the dictionary says. I don't mind the thought of law enforcement lying to people to get them to confess to doing bad things. I do it myself on a daily basis. Yet somehow I am bothered that Officer Fassace lied about clocking me at 55 and even more bothered that I automatically and unknowingly admitted to a lesser crime to refute said lie. Even worse, I find that I have no inclination to stop lying to suspects in the future, nor do I wish the police to stop lying on my behalf while trying to stop suspected bad guys from hurting me. I think that makes me a hypocrite.
Oh, well. Two speeding tickets in 25 years of driving isn't too bad. I'll pay the fine and consider it a cheap reminder to pay more attention to road signs in the future.
I'll still probably do something unmentionable to the check before I mail it off, though.
