Sunday, May 10, 2009

Words You Don't Want To Be Greeted With When You Answer The Door

For example, "Hello, is Mike home?" Guy flips up his badge. "I'm from the Attorney General's office." Thud.

If you're on Facebook, you already know the situation about the ticket on the van. Let me rehash in case you didn't catch it. Mike parks his van in the driveway at night. It was over 30' off the street. A couple weeks ago the police left a ticket on his windshield at 2:55 a.m. for not having a village sticker displayed in the window. The following morning he went over to the police department to explain that he had bought the village sticker back in February, but just hadn't put it on the window. The police officer didn't care. Mike questioned why there were on private property at that hour, and the officer basically said that "in a court of law" it would stand up that policemen can see that far in the dark, and so that gave them reason to come onto our property. Nevermind that it was a 2" x 3" sticker this officer supposedly could see. In the dark. From 31' away. So Mike went to the Mayor to complain. The Mayor was quite sympathetic and helpful, actually, and within a couple of hours, someone from the Mayor's office called to say the ticket had been dismissed. Woohoo for the little guy!

So back to the guy from the Attorney General's office standing on my front porch. Mike did happen to be home that day and to make a long story short, it appears Mike unwittingly got caught up in some small town scandal, for crying out loud. The Mayor handled the dismissal of the ticket illegally, along with a slew of other things (nothing we're involved in, just want to make that clear.) The Mayor is in some serious hot water and under investigation. I suppose that would explain why he didn't run for office for more than one term. So the Attorney General guy came to our house three times to talk with Mike about this ticket, how it all went down, who said what, and it just seemed a bit ridiculous over a stupid ticket for a village sticker that we already owned. Doesn't it just seem wrong that on the one hand you have the police doing their job (albeit a bit shifty in my opinion) but they're legal about it. And then you have the Mayor who takes the time to listen to a problem and try to solve it, and it's illegal. I guess it's true what they say: No good deed goes unpunished.

3 comments:

Kim S said...

Good grief! Glad it wasn't worse than that. What a crazy story.

Mel P said...

The mind boggles!

My Three Girls (The A girls) said...

That must have been scary..the knock at the door. Wow..that is a one of a kind Mayor you have.