Tuesday, July 22, 2008

I fought the law

You know it's gonna be a great day, when you look in your rear-view mirror and see this:

The story:

Yesterday, Sue and I decided we were going to take her car to try to get it inspected and registered. It has been sitting in our driveway since November, and since she is getting her license in about 16 days, she wanted to get it ready. Before leaving though, I thought I might want to call and get the car put on our insurance, so I did.

After insuring it, we took the car about 3 minutes from our house, to a Jiffy Lube.
The car failed :(

It failed because the horn doesn't work, and because when they hooked up the emissions, the car read "not ready". The guy told us it said that because the car had either been sitting for a long period of time (which it has) or because we replaced the battery very recently (which we did). He told us it was an easy problem to solve though, all we had to do was drive it for about 60-100 miles and the sensors should be able to get a reading. SOOOOOOOOOOOO, we took it for a drive.

We took it out on Backus so that we could go pretty fast and pretty far without a lot of traffic.

At approx. 22 miles into our drive, I had to stop at a light (it was red). Then, along came a police officer. I could tell immediately that he was going to pull us over. And he did.

He came to the window. He was nice. He asked to see my license and registration. I showed him my license and our failed safety and emissions while I explained what we were doing. He told us that we were committing multiple offences. First, and the reason we got pulled over in the first place, was that the plates were expired. Plus, we still had the same plates on the car from Trent (which evidently is a towable offence) and when they ran the plates, it said we didn't have insurance. The guy was nice, but told us we should have gone about this differently. I explained that we didn't know which laws we should break, because there wasn't a way to do what we needed to do legally. He told us he could tell that I was telling the truth about what I was doing, but because we were doing so many things wrong, he would be back in a few minutes, after he knew the course of action he should take.

Along comes cop #2.
He comes to the window and tells me that we shouldn't have those plates on the car, and that legally, he should seize them.
I told him he could take them if that's what he needed to do, but we aren't trying to do anything fishy.
He leaves, and comes back with more comments: How can you prove this is your car? Do you have the title?
I say: "no, it's at home."
In my head I'm SCREAMING who in the HELL drives with their title in the car? (sorry for the language) My van and truck are both paid off and we don't drive with the title in either one of those vehicles!!!!!!!

Then he says: How can you prove that you have insurance on this car?
I say, I guess you can call the place if you would like to.
Then he says: you mean to tell me, that you insured a car that has been sitting for the last 7 months with no one driving it? (in other words, he's calling me a liar!)
I say no, I called and got insurance just before taking it to get inspected.
Finally he takes the stupid plates off the car and goes back to get another shot of testosterone.

After what seems like forever, the nice cop comes back. He gives me all my stuff back, then tells me the correct way of getting the *$#^ thing registered. And then asks me for my word in taking care of it legally tomorrow (now today). We didn't get a ticket of any kind. Whew!

Guess what...we got it done legally this morning, but still waiting on the horn and enough miles to do emissions.

Songs for this post:
Bad Boyz- theme song from cops
I fought the law (but I won!)

3 comments:

Shill and Company said...
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Zobell Fam said...
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Unknown said...

I absolutely love your story! Your blog cheers me up. Thank you for the laugh. How did the trek go have you gone yet?