I Brake for Criminals

Aside from being able to perform tasks pantsless, the best thing about working at home is that you don’t have to drive anywhere. I hate driving. If it weren’t for the amount of time I spend on the road, I would very likely be one of those sedate Pete Seeger-type bearded individuals who always seem to keep bees or grow their own hemp or something. Instead, because my job requires a certain amount of driving, I am slightly more tense than, say, a Serengeti wildlife proctologist.

My friends say I am impatient. They are clearly fools. It’s not me; it’s the other guy. Duh.

Part of this, of course, is because I live in central Pennsylvania, where drivers seem to be taught that the brake pedal is somehow a useful tool. This is idiocy at its worst. The brake pedal is to be used only in extreme emergency situations, such as sighting a police cruiser or parking.

I learned to drive in Philadelphia, where the roads are teeming with people who hate you and want to kill you and then maybe drive back and forth over your body a couple of times. There, I developed the idea that tailgating was a mean, awful, horrible thing that only smokers and fugitives from justice did. Tailgating, for those of you who don’t know, is the practice of driving as close as possible to the rear bumper of the car in front of you, in hopes that the person driving will either speed up or get really upset and maybe spill his Dunkin Donuts Coffee Coolata into his lap.

In central Pennsylvania, I have learned that tailgating is a useful motivational tool and should be frequently used, unless there are police officers around. I was once stopped for tailgating by a Pennsylvania state police trooper who was either very nice or very stupid.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” he asked. Cops always ask this, and I wonder if anyone ever says something like “Because of all those old people I swindled?” or “Because I slept with your wife?”

“Ummm… I guess I was kinda tailgating that car in front of me,” I said. Men don’t have the ability to cry their way out of tickets like women do, so we have to act sheepish, thereby affirming the officer’s role as the alpha male, and perhaps appealing to his sense of machismo.

“Yes you were,” said the officer, clearly secure in his masculinity. I should have made a pass at him. “Do you know the rule for following the car in front of you?”

Rule? Sure I knew the rule. It had something to do with estimating the number of car lengths between you, and multiplying by ten, and getting your speed in miles per hour, and I was pretty sure Avigadro’s Number figured in there somewhere. I related this much to the cop, and we dickered over what the hell Avigadro did to deserve his own number, since neither of us had our own number, and we work hard to put food on the table, at least as hard as Avigadro did, who probably never lifted a finger in his life except to pick up a piece of chalk, which we were pretty sure they didn’t even have in ancient Greece, and there you are.

Actually, he just told me I was wrong. Apparently that used to be the right formula, but people stopped paying attention to the road so they could find the discrete numbers settings on their scientific calculators, and some people got in accidents, so they changed it.

Now it’s something called the “two-second rule,” which means that you give the jackass in front of you exactly two seconds to put his foot on the freaking gas pedal before you ram him from behind.

Kidding again. It means that you pick an object by the side of the road, like a mailbox or an Amish person, and start counting after the car in front of you passes it. If you get to two by the time your car passes the object, you’re not tailgating.

So get this: The cop let me off the hook, because – and this is, like, totally what he said – I knew what I was doing wrong. Seriously.

I don’t know about you, but when I see cops out there setting scofflaws free because they have a pretty good understanding of the crime code they violated, I go around the house locking the doors and maybe start thinking about vigilante justice and whether I could get one of those grappling hook guns like Batman has. Imagine if the whole criminal justice system worked like that.

JUDGE: It says here you strangled six preschool teachers with their own intestines while their students watched in horror.

SERIAL KILLER: Oh yeah. Boy was that illegal. Total violation of this state’s murder statute. Wow.

JUDGE: You did the right thing by telling me. The court clerk will give you a lollipop on your way out.

I’m not complaining. I didn’t get a ticket, and I get to keep tailgating stupid drivers, safe in the knowledge that our state’s criminal justice system will let self-aware criminals like myself off the hook.

But I’m still miserable. People drive so slowly. And they lean on their brakes. And they slow the car to one mile an hour before making a turn. And they sit at four-way stop signs for minutes on end, where I assume they wring their hands and wonder what to do.

On the up side, I have developed what is perhaps the most extensive lexicon of lewd imperative phraseology. I never fail to impress myself when attempting to come up with a suitable suggestion as to what a particular driver should do with his grandmother, or his dog, or a pair of incontinent oxen.

This will likely result in numerous job offers someday.