- “The handcuffs are tight because they’re new. They’ll stretch out after you wear them awhile.”
- “If you run, you’ll only go to jail tired.”
- “So, you don’t know how fast you were going. I guess that means I can write anything I want on the ticket, huh?”
- “Yes sir, you can talk to the shift supervisor, but I don’t think it will help. Oh, did I mention that I am the shift supervisor?”
- “Warning! You want a warning? O.K., I’m warning you not to do that again or I’ll give you another ticket.”
- “The answer to this last question will determine whether you are drunk or not. Was Mickey Mouse a cat or dog?”
- “Yeah, we have a quota. Two more tickets and my wife gets a toaster oven.”
- “Life’s tough, it’s tougher if you’re stupid.”
- “No sir, we don’t have quotas anymore. We used to have quotas, but now we’re allowed to write as many tickets as we want.”
- “Just how big were those two beers?
- “In God we trust, all others are suspects.”
Tag Archives: lists
What is Said Versus What is Meant
- While on routine patrol…
I was in the car because the coffee shop was closed. - The motorist was operating his vehicle in a reckless manner
He had a bumper sticker that said “SLOW DOWN-DON’T FEED THE PIGS” - The accident scene and the safety of the victims prevented this officer from doing traffic control.
It was raining. - This officer went out-of-service to obtain intelligence information from a street informant.
It was too hot to ride in the car. - I observed the suspect acting in a suspicious manner…
The dirt-bag let go with an “Oink” as I walked by. - Knowing the suspect had a criminal history…
He puked on my uniform one night… - The informant is of known credibility and has provided reliable information in the past…
I’ve got two theft cases hanging over his head… - While being arrested, this subject resisted being injured in the act…
He ripped my shirt and broke my new mirror sunglasses… - The motorist was cited for multiple traffic violations…
I wrote one citation for each swear-word he used… - Upon announcing my title and purpose, I heard a voice from inside the house say “Come in” so this writer entered through the door…
The rock music was so loud they wouldn’t have heard Patton’s army so I kicked in the door. - The members of the press at the scene were offered every courtesy within departmental policies…
I sent then to a nonexistent address which I called the “Command Post”. - I gave the motorist a verbal warning for speeding…
She was a good-looking blonde who owned a liquor store and who was free after my shift was over. - The Chief appeared at the scene and took command…
I sent him to the same address as the reporters. - Further interview of the witness was impossible, due to conditions.
It was my bowling night… - The motorist eyes were glassy, he had slurred speech , was unsteady on his feet, and smelled strongly of an alcoholic beverage.
He was howling at the moon and trying to drive the car from the back seat. - Using only enough force to restrain the subject…
My favorite song is “Drop-kick me Jesus Through the Goal Post of Life” - The defendant asked this officer’s advice on how to act before the judge at his arraignment…
I told him he didn’t have the balls to call the judge the same name he called me.
You May Be A Cop If…
- You have the bladder capacity of five people;
- You have ever restrained someone and it was not a sexual experience;
- You believe that 25% of people are a waste of protoplasm;
- Your idea of a good time is a robbery at shift change;
- You call for a CCH on anyone that is friendly toward you;
- You think it is perfectly normal to discuss dismemberment over a gourmet meal;
- You can identify a negative “tattoo to tooth” ratio just by looking at a person;
- You find humor in other people’s stupidity;
- You believe in the aerial spraying of Prozac;
- You disbelieve 90% of what you hear and 75% of what you see;
- You have your weekends off planned for a year in advance;
- You believe that a “shallow gene pool” should be grounds for an arrest;
- You believe that the Government should require a permit to reproduce;
- You believe that unspeakable evils will befall you if anyone says “Boy, it sure is quiet around here”;
- You refer to your nightstick as your “Dork Slayer”;
- You believe that chocolate is a food group;
- You take it as a compliment when someone calls you a prick;
- You have wanted to hold a seminar on “Suicide, getting it right the first time;,
- You believe that “too stupid to live” should be a valid jury verdict;
- You have had to put a complainant on hold, while you laugh uncontrollably;
- You have wanted a terrorist to deliver a Ryder truck to a particular bar;
- You believe the dispatcher is possessed;
- You think caffeine should be available in I.V. form;
- You’re not referring to food when you mention vegetables;
- You believe that the holding cell should come with a Valium salt lick;
- You have heard: “I have no idea how that got there,” on more than a few occasions;
- You suddenly realize one night that you are patrolling the Twilight Zone;
- You correlate “two beers” with 0.15 BAC;
- You have learned a lot about paranoia, simply by following random cars around in your patrol car;
- You believe that it is a “good” death only if it involves overtime;
Advice to Dumb Criminals
(based on what other dumb criminals have done)
- If you plan to commit a crime and run from the police on foot… *Do* pick a more subtle color to wear than bright yellow pants.
- *Don’t* invite a uniformed police officer into your home to chat about a crime you witnessed if you have dope on the table in plain view.
- When you go on a burglary spree *Do* ensure you have enough gas in your vehicle to drive away from your crime scene.
- “But I know the people who live here” is *Not* a valid justification for burglarizing a neighbors house when they are out of town.
- When an officer is demonstrating a field sobriety test *Don’t* say, “Well, I can’t do that sober!” on camera, and then plead not guilty.
- If you are going to steal a car *Do* pick one that will blend in traffic better than a pearl white six door limo.
- *Don’t* answer a question with the phrase, “Who me?” when you and the officer are the only people in a ten mile radius.
- *Don’t* repeat the question that the officer just asked. It’s considered a stall technique and it gives away the fact you are getting ready to lie through your teeth.
- *Don’t* say, “I ain’t got no dope. Why you wanna search my car?” before the officer even introduces himself/herself on the traffic stop.
- *Do* pick an alias you can spell before you lie to the police about your name.
- *Do* ensure the birthday you give matches the age you give when lying about your birthday.
- When you attempt to drop your dope on the ground when approached by an officer, *Don’t* bounce said dope off the toe of the officer’s boot.
- *Do* come up with something better to say than, “These aren’t my pants” when the officer finds dope or any other contraband in your pocket.
- If you are going to jump into a stranger’s fenced back yard *Do* make sure a police K-9 vehicle is not parked in the driveway.
- *Don’t* ask an off duty plain clothes officer in his privately owned vehicle for a ride away from your crime scene.
- If you leave your pants, car, and ID at a crime scene, the cops *Will* probably be able to figure out who dunnit
911 Calls
The following exchanges are taken from transcripts of 911 calls.
- Caller: “I’d like to make a unanimous complaint, so don’t use my name.”
- Caller: “I’m reporting a deer on the road. I almost hit it.”
Call-taker: “Is the deer alive?”
Caller: “Oh, no, it’s run over. Many, many cars. Again and again, and – OH NO!!! NOT AGAIN!” - Caller: “Am I talking to a real person, or this a recording?”
- Caller: “We might (cough) need the fire department here (cough).”
- Caller: “Is it okay for a civilian to take a person to the hospital, or does the ambulance have to do it?”
- Caller: (irate) “That’s ‘W’ as in Williams and ‘Y’ as in why.”
- Caller (on realising the police are on the way): “Get the keg outta here, dude!”
- Caller: “He’s not breathing!”
Call-taker: “Can you get the phone close to him?”
Caller: “WHY? You want to hear he’s not breathing, too?” - Call-taker: “Does she have any weapons?”
Caller: “Well, she has real long finger nails.” - Call-taker: “We’ll need a description of him.”
Caller: “He’s a lawyer.” - Caller: “No, she just didn’t fall…I helped her!”
- Complaint about a stolen mailbox:
Call-taker: “What is your address?”
Caller: “It’s gone.” - Caller: “I’m scared, I just got a Ouija board for my birthday, and now there’s writing on my wall and I can’t get it off……this thing is going back to K-Mart first thing in the morning!
12 Things Not to Say to a Cop
- I can’t reach my license unless you hold my beer.
- Sorry, Officer, I didn’t realize my radar detector wasn’t plugged in.
- Aren’t you the guy from the Village People?
- Hey, you must’ve been doin’ about 125 mph to keep up with me. Good job!
- Are you Andy or Barney?
- I thought you had to be in relatively good physical condition to be a police officer.
- You’re not gonna check the trunk are you?
- I pay your salary!
- Gee, Officer! That’s terrific. The last officer only gave me a warning too!
- Do you know why you pulled me over? Okay, just so one of us does.
- I was trying to keep up with traffic. Yes, I know there are no other cars around. That’s how far ahead of me they are.
- When the Officer says “Gee Son…Your eyes look red, have you been drinking?”, you probably shouldn’t respond with, “Gee Officer your eyes looked glazed, have you been eating donuts?”
Signs You Are Webbed Out
- Your opening line is, “So what’s your home page address?”
- Your best friend is someone you’ve never met.
- You see a beautiful sunset, and you half expect to see “Enhanced for Internet Explorer 9” on one of the clouds.
- You are overcome with disbelief, anger and finally depressed when you encounter a Web page with no links.
- You feel driven to consult the “Cool Page of the Day” on your wedding day.
- You are driving on a dark and rainy night when you hydroplane on puddle, sending your car careening toward the flimsy guard rail that separates you from the precipice of a rocky cliff and certain death. You look for the “Back” button.
- You visit “The Really Big Button that Doesn’t Do Anything” again and again and again.
- Your dog has his own Web page.
- So does your hamster.
- When you read a magazine, you have an irresistible urge to click on the underlined passages.
The Nine Types of Users
Scon is short for Student Consultant. Scons are people hired to help users learn and work with the university’s machinery. A pod is a UNM term for a place where such machinery is made available.
| El Explicito | “I tried the thing, ya know, and it worked, ya know, but now it doesn’t, ya know?” |
| Advantages | Provides interesting communication challenges. |
| Disadvantages | So do chimps. |
| Symptoms | Complete inability to use proper nouns |
| Real Case | One user walked up to a certain Armenian pod manager and said, “I can’t get what I want!” The pod manager leaned back, put his hands on his belt-buckle, and said, “Well, ma’am, you’ve come to the right place.” |
| Mad Bomber | “Well, I hit ALT-F6, SHIFT-F8, CTRL-F10, F4, and F9, and now it looks all weird.” |
| Advantages | Will try to find own solution to problems. |
| Disadvantages | User might have translated document to Navajo without meaning to. |
| Symptoms | More than six stopped jobs in UNIX, a 2:1 code-to-letter ratio in WordPerfect |
| Real Case | One user came in complaining that his WordPerfect document was underlined. When I used reveal codes on it, I found that he’d set and unset underline more than fifty times in his document. |
| Frying Pan/Fire Tactician | “It didn’t work with the data set we had, so I fed in my aunt’s recipe for key lime pie.” |
| Advantages | Will usually fix error. |
| Disadvantages | “Fix” is defined very loosely here. |
| Symptoms | A tendancy to delete lines that get errors instead of fixing them. |
| Real Case | One user complained that their program executed, but didn’t do anything. The scon looked at it for twenty minutes before realizing that they’d commented out every line. The user said, “Well, that was the only way I could get it to compile.” |
| Shaman | “Last week, when the moon was full, the clouds were thick, and Formahaut was above the horizon, I typed f77, and lo, it did compile.” |
| Advantages | Gives insight into primative mythology. |
| Disadvantages | Few scons are anthropology majors. |
| Symptoms | Frequent questions about irrelavent objects. |
| Real Case | One user complained that all information on one of their disks got erased (as Norton Utilities showed nothing but empty sectors, I suspect nothing had ever been on it). Reasoning that the deleted information went *somewhere*, they wouldn’t shut up until the scon checked four different disks for the missing information. |
| X-user | “Will you look at those…um, that resolution, quite impressive, really.” |
| Advantages | Using the cutting-edge in graphics technology. |
| Disadvantages | Has little or no idea how to use the cutting-edge in graphics technology. |
| Symptoms | Fuzzy hands, blindness |
| Real Case | When I was off duty, two users sat down in front of me at DEC station 5000/200s that systems was reconfiguring. I suppressed my laughter while, for twenty minutes, they sat down and did their best to act like they were doing exectly what they wanted to do, even though they couldn’t log in. |
| Miracle Worker | “But it read a file from it yesterday!” “Sir, at a guess, this disk has been swallowed and regurgitated. “But I did that a month ago, and it read a file from it yesterday!” |
| Advantages | Apparently has remarkable luck when you aren’t around. |
| Disadvantages | People complain when scons actually use the word “horse-puckey.” |
| Symptoms | Loses all ability to do impossible when you’re around. Must be the kryptonite in your pocket. |
| Real Case | At least three users have claimed that they’ve loaded IBM WordPerfect from Macintosh disks. |
| Taskmaster | “Well, this is a file in MacWrite. Do you know how I can upload it to MUSIC, transfer it over to UNIX from there, download it onto an IBM, convert it to WordPerfect, and put it in three-column format?” |
| Advantages | Bold new challanges. |
| Disadvantages | Makes one wish to be a garbage collector. |
| Symptoms | An inability to keep quiet. Strong tendancies to make machines do things they don’t want to do. |
| Real Case | One user tried to get a scon to find out what another person’s E-mail address was even though the user didn’t know his target’s home system, account name, or real name. |
| Maestro | “Well, first I sat down, like this. Then I logged on, like this, and after that, I typed in my password, like this, and after that I edited my file, like this, and after that I went to this line here, like this, and after that I picked my nose, like this. . .” |
| Advantages | Willing to show you exactly what they did to get an error. |
| Disadvantages | For as long as five or six hours. |
| Symptoms | Selective deafness to the phrase, “Right, right, okay, but what was the error?”, and a strong fondness for the phrase, “Well, I’m getting to that.” |
| Real Case | I once had to spend half an hour looking over a user’s shoulder while they continuously retrieved a document into itself and denied that they did it (the user was complaining that their document was 87 copies of the same thing). |
| Princess (unfair, perhaps, as these tend, overwhelmingly, to be males) |
“I need a Mac, and someone’s got the one I like reserved, would you please garrote him and put him in the paper recycling bin?” |
| Advantages | Flatters you with their high standards for your service. |
| Disadvantages | Impresses you with their obliviousness to other people on this planet. |
| Symptoms | Inability to communicate except by complaining. |
| Real Case | One asked a scon to remove the message of the day because he (the user) didn’t like it. |
You Know It’s the Network Age When…
- You just tried to enter your password on the microwave.
- You now think of three espressos as “getting wasted.”
- You haven’t played solitaire with a real deck of cards in years.
- You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of three.
- You call your son’s beeper to let him know it’s time to eat. He e-mails you back from his bedroom, “What’s for dinner?”
- Your daughter sells Girl Scout Cookies via her web site.
- You chat several times a day with a stranger from South Africa, but you haven’t spoken with your next door neighbor yet this year.
- You didn’t give your valentine a card this year, but you posted one for your e-mail buddies via a web page.
- Your daughter just bought a CD of all the records your college roommate used to play.
- You check the ingredients on a can of chicken noodle soup to see if it contains echinacea.
- You check your blow-dryer to see if it’s Y2K compliant.
- Your grandmother clogs up your e-mail inbox asking you to send her a JPEG file of your newborn so she can create a screen saver.
- You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home.
- Every commercial on television has a website address at the bottom of the screen.
- You buy a computer and a week later it is out of date and now sells for half the price you paid.
- The concept of using real money, instead of credit or debit, to make a purchase is foreign to you.
- Cleaning up the dining room means getting the fast food bags out of the back seat of your car.
- Your reason for not staying in touch with family is that they do not have e-mail addresses.
- You consider second-day air delivery painfully slow.
- Your dining room table is now your flat filing cabinet.
- Your idea of being organized is multi-colored Post-it notes.
- You hear most of your jokes via e-mail instead of in person.
- You’re reading this.
- Even worse; you’re going to forward it to someone else.
Spinoffs on the I Love You Virus
Security experts and federal government authorities warn that offspring of the dangerous e-mail virus are now on the loose. As a public service, we present the following list of “I Love You”
variations and how to recognize them:
- The “I Love You, Too” virus responds with an appropriate letter stating that the user loves you as well. Spreads peace and harmony throughout the corporate workplace, causing lost productivity and chaos on Wall Street as no one tries to screw anyone else out of a deal.
- The “I Love You, But I’m Shy” virus never actually invades your computer but collects data about it worshipfully from afar.
- The “Unrequited Love” virus causes your computer to be so obsessed with a virus-a virus that it can never have-that it can no longer function.
- The “Love The One You’re With” virus hangs around your computer, but the whole thing is just temporary until it can find the computer that it really wants to invade.
- The “Can’t We Just Be Friends” virus makes your computer think it’s interested in invading. Then, just when your computer is getting excited about the invasion, it breaks off the connection with your computer, dashing its hard drive against the rocks.
- The “I’m looking for more of a commitment” virus – Receives the “I love you” virus email and immediately schedules a recurring event called “hold for my sweetie” for Friday and Saturdays into your calendar and the calendar of the person who sent the mail, registers you for a year of pre-paid videos at Blockbuster.com, and deletes any appointments called “Golf with the guys” or “Night out with the Girls.” It also erases the phone number from the contact card for your ‘ex’, and puts in a monthly reminder for the anniversary of your first date.
- The “One Night Stand” virus invades your computer, turns its hard drive upside down, then disappears after promising to come back sometime. But it leaves a twenty in your online bank account.
- The “Happily Married” virus invades only one computer and stays with it for life.
- The “Unhappily Married” virus spends a long time negotiating with a computer, finally invades it, and then strays to other computers from time to time.
- The “I Can’t Commit” virus hangs around a computer for a long time and frequently sends messages that it intends to invade, but is really just interested in playing with your computer’s data.
- The “It’s Just A Physical Thing” virus invades your computer on a regular basis, but no meaningful data is ever exchanged.
- The “I Want A Divorce” virus sends repeated, hard-to-read messages that your computer is never turned on, then finally leaves. But it returns some time later and takes half of your computer’s best data in an ugly network session.
- The “Little Virus Of The Evening” virus will do anything to your computer–if you’re willing to pay the right price.
- The “Stalker” virus spends unnatural amounts of time monitoring your computer, collecting data your computer has thrown away and trying to record its most intimate functions.
- The “Forever Single” virus causes your computer to focus solely on other computers that are totally incompatible with it.
- The “Deadbeat Dad” virus invades your computer, spawns an entirely new database, then refuses to help update it as it grows.
- The “Married Too Long” virus splits your PC into two partitions that never interface-one that does too much online shopping and one that never does anything except monitor espn.com. — This message is done on 100% recycled electrons.
- The “Let’s just be friends” virus – Immediately deletes the “I love you” virus, sends a “Let’s Just be friends” response, and books you for a discount weekend at Hedonism at an online travel site.
- The “Unsafe Sex” virus – Spreads unprotected files to every other hard disk on the net.
- The “Safe Sex” virus – Wraps the “I Love You letter” in a container that keeps it from spreading 99.45% of the time.
- The “Sexual Harassment Lawsuit” virus – Forwards a copy of the “I Love You” virus to Human Resources and to your lawyer with threatening legal language attached. Automatically accepts settlement offer emails over $100k.