Officer Alex explains the unwritten “one lie” rule (and one lie only)
“Tiny Sammiches.”
That’s what you’d have us believe when you get caught for something stupid and try to explain away the dozens of tiny Ziploc baggies you have on hand?
You’re going to use your one lie (since two or more is just outright rude and changes the dynamic completely) to imply you’re distributing Skittles by the half-dozen, or you’re a purveyor of tiny flat hors d’oeuvres that require a moisture barrier? Please.
Day in and day out, bad lies. “No sir, I’m not drunk,” says the vagrant holding a half-empty bottle of Aristocrat with a urine-soaked leg caught in a storm drain while also wearing a hiking boot on his head.
“I only had a couple of beers, Officer,” says the bloodshot and glassy-eyed college student panting out puffs of nearly visible alcohol while shakily observing the rear wheels of his 1989 Impala sticking out of the fountain at the former Temple University.
“Why no officer, I don’t know how that got in there. To be honest, these aren’t my pants.”
Let’s hold the show a minute on that last one. “These aren’t my pants”? That’s what you bring to the game? You’re wearing someone else’s brown-skid riddled ravioli stained corduroy pants that by tragic coincidence had a lumpy bag of Black Tar heroin in the front right pocket and your wallet in the back (since it contained your “DUI Offender—ID Only” license and your CVS card) I mean…that’s your Perry Mason “Ah Hah!” moment?
We deserve a better class of criminal. I know, I know, I should be grateful for all this low-hanging fruit, but if you’re a professional athlete you need more than a series of soft pitches or you’ll lose your edge. That’s just science! What am I supposed to do, hope I get behind a car full of escaped pathological liars from some non-existent group home and pray it has a bad brake light or something? It’s not going to happen! I’ve crunched the numbers!
No. My only hope is to move to a town full of semi-intelligent misdemeanants (which is simply not feasible—I mean I love Washington D.C., but the cost of living? Eeugh) or to hope for the local criminal element to step up their game. And I mean REALLY step it up.
Remember the “one lie rule” noted above? It’s a real thing. I can smile at one lie, it’s expected—but after you see me smile in response to your inane bullhockey, I’ve called you out and anything beyond that means you’re desperate (and therefore now maintenance intensive, aka “no fun”) or you think I’m in idiot, and while that’s fair enough, you’ve now annoyed me and annoyance isn’t what I’m going for here and whatever bond we may have shared has been broken.
As far as what you’re willing to lie about (i.e., The Pants) like any good wish don’t WASTE that lie. Use perspective. You need to ask yourself: Will I need to lie at a more important juncture further into this transaction? Am I a repeat offender likely to encounter this Johnny Law again in the course of my fruitless travels, and therefore in need of a solid long term rapport? Is the nature of my criminal enterprise such that I may become a victim of a business associate or client and may therefore need the services of Law Enforcement in the near future?
This is what I’m speaking of. Perspective. And even if it’s not a long-term career for you, it still applies to random encounters from traffic stops to accidentally killing the neighbor’s seeing-eye dog, as we can all relate.
The rest is about originality, and I cannot teach that—you either have it or you don’t—but I can say that you should at least make your One Lie something remotely applicable to the situation. Plead a bad home situation. A fight with a spouse – use a real insult or action from your past such as “I wasn’t paying attention to my speed because my girlfriend just dropped my set of Makita cordless drills and saws in the pool when she saw my ex send a friend request on Facebook.” Make the cop squint, and associate with you. Become a team, not an insult. Is that so hard?
Just ponder this a bit, my constant readers…and have a heart. These skills are sharp, but only through constant sharpening. Be an emotional wet stone for your local fuzz. If anything, you will get a better story out of the encounter for your friends, too.
When officer Alexander D. Teach is not patrolling our fair city on the heels of the criminal element, he spends his spare time volunteering for the Boehm Birth Defects Center.