Officer Alex ruminating on having yet another one of "those days"
Another close call in a career full of close calls, but yet again I had somehow made it.Coincidence? Skill? Probably the former but you hope it was the latter, though in the end it makes no difference either way.
I’d made it and I could relax, my keeper rings (those things that keep our gun belt attached to the inner pants belt) in the sink, my gear belt on the floor, and my buttocks planted comfortably on the pot in an unusually well air conditioned restroom.
I dropped my face into my hands, wincing as my right elbow dug into my bad knee—an injury so old I literally forget about it until I make such contact (or the barometer drops).
I sat quietly and began to think now that the panicked dash to the crapper was over when something caught my eye in the trash can that made my blood run cold and my colon seize up like a ten-dollar lawnmower engine, negating the pains I’d taken to make it here in time in the first place. It was an empty bottle of “Michelob Ultra Lime Cactus” lying beside another empty bottle, this one a “Mich Ultra Pomegranate Raspberry”.
“Sweet Jesus,” I mumbled to myself. I was laying cable in the women’s restroom, and there is no “not leaving in uniform” option.
I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to look at the patient shadow projecting below the door of the next hopeful customer. (I would have covered my ears also but it was too late—I could already tell she was talking to a friend, which means the women’s Olympic volleyball team could be out there for all I knew.)
I don’t mind complaints; they come with the job and I’m confident in what I do, and if I’m wrong, I own up to that too. They can yell at me but they cannot eat me. But a preventable complaint? I was better than this, but it is what it is.
Normally if I want a complaint I would just write someone a “warning ticket”. They really do exist when Officer Friendly feels that you are in the Hinterlands of a violation, but don’t necessarily need to lose a day’s pay sitting in the circus tent known as municipal court.
Warning tickets are intended to give you tangible notice that you need to correct your driving behavior while still showing the bosses that one is working the job, but in reality?
They are generally a guarantee of getting a complaint when the fortunate driver begins to internalize what has gone from “getting a break” to it now being some kind of “personal affront” and BY GOD, a CALL will be placed to the police chief, councilman, Mayor, or in one instance, a sitting U.S. Senator.
I have never understood this phenomenon because I have never, in hundreds of tickets written, received a complaint for a “real” citation, but a warning ticket seemed to be a 50/50 chance of a complaint that would ultimately result in my letting the person know I can go ahead and cite them to court if they feel they have not been afforded the right for someone to hear their case for the offense I did not, in fact, cite them for. It ends in silence, but it is indeed something I will never understand. Unlike the polite knocking at the bathroom door I was basically hiding in now.
There was nothing to do of course but to just do it. I placed my hand near my shoulder mic after reassembling my gear, and with the free hand I opened the restroom door with dramatic flair and acted like I was speaking to dispatch, having solved a Police Emergency.
“Negative, nothing to see here, show me on route for follow up though, code 86.” (None of this meant anything—even the code was made up—but it was a means of escape that negated human contact and with a bit of luck, a lack of focus on my nametag.)
Where were we again? AH! “Warning Tickets.” I was going to do my best to write one in the next 30 minutes because if I’m going to get a complaint, it’s not going to be for using the wrong gendered restroom. (Again.)
Till the next time, Constant Readers.
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.