Madness By Mattie

About a month ago Ben was driving into our subdivision that has a long straight away before you really get into the residential area. He got pulled over there going 10 mph over the speed limit. I was annoyed but have gotten used to trying my best to ignore these incidences. I quit holding it over his head once I found out that apparently a lot of the neighbors had gotten tickets that week. The cops must have been trying to teach a lesson to the locals or make their quotas and knew they had an easy target there.

We just got a quote on car insurance from a friend and he informed Ben that he and I had the same number of points against our license. Mine is a ticket from about two and half years ago and Ben’s being from about four weeks ago. Ben was pretty smug and rubbed it in that my driving record was as harmful to us getting insurance as his was.

Well last Thursday Ben got pulled over and he told me about it over the phone. (I’m sure he figured it would be safer if he wasn’t within strangling distance.) He got pulled over on Eagle Road just outside our subdivision for rolling a stop sign. Apparently that cop has never tried to get onto Eagle Road during morning rush hour. So he pulled Ben over and of course Ben doesn’t have his insurance card on him (I know because it has been waiting patiently next to our garage door for him to put in the glove box for about two months). Not to mention our new registration and stickers were sitting on the counter despite me annoyingly nagging Ben to put them on his car.

So the cop is on a motorcycle and has to call in to get information. He writes Ben a ticket for not having proof of insurance and another for failure to come to a complete stop at a stop sign AND another one for driving on a suspended license. It seems Ben forgot to pay for his last ticket and so his license was suspended on Monday of that week. They do send out a notice but it went to our last address (a PO Box in Hailey that we haven’t had for about four years). It seems that they updated our physical address but not our billing address when we moved.

“The cop was being nice about it but there wasn’t anything he could do,” Ben said.

I explained to Ben that NO the cop was not being nice and YES there was something he could have done. For a start he could have let Ben off with a warning about rolling the stop sign.

“Were you nice to him again?” I asked Ben.

“Yes.”

“WHY?!?!”

“Because he was being a nice guy and it wouldn’t make me feel any better to yell at him. That never solves anything,” Ben reasoned.

“It would make me feel a lot better!” I informed Ben.