Wednesday, August 11, 2010

I'm here to protect you

I can tell by osmosis that many of my readers are big fans of the cops, so I thought it was about time I talked about some of my days when I was a member of the boys in blue, the finest protectors in the world’s little brother, the police force. (The finest protectors in the world are obviously surfers; their tireless effort to protect us from sharks taking over the mainland should never be forgotten).


When I was a cop I was hardcore, that means I played by my rules, and my rules were neatly summed up in a book they gave us when we joined the police force, this book was referred to as ‘the book’ and if you decided, like me, to make your own rules basically the same as the one’s in ‘the book’ then your rules would be pretty much the same as everyone else’s on the force, and that helped us all get along way better. Hell yeah, it’s that kind of attitude which cops need to adhere to all else partners get slapped by each other, and its never manly to slap another man.


Now as a hardcore law enforcer one of my primary responsibilities was to go to schools to scare the kids straight by talking at assemblies. (And by assembly I mean the assembligation of a group of kids, I was not talking while kids like assembled model air planes or something, no, never, not this cop).


These assemblies were always poorly attended of course. I guess the bad kids were always too scared to hear the truth! That’s right police uniforms are dry-clean only, so if you become a cop you need to take that into account or else the drain in your salary from keeping a clean uniform may severely throw off your projected spending power in the up-coming fiscal year. Those bad kids, always scared to hear someone say ‘fiscal’, I know it’s hard to pronounce but that’s no reason to flee the scene kids! I would often feel very guilty after these assemblies, but not for the bad kids lack of guts. No, for my own failures, but we’ll get to that.


In these assemblies I’d get to say stuff like ‘study hard or else they’ll hold you back and make you repeat a year or two and then you’ll end up that weird older guy still in school’.


‘Hey aren’t you like 30? You’re the weird older guy in this school!’ a kid would always inevitably yell out. And as the rest of the kids burst into laughter I would remember exactly why I decided to become a cop in the first place – to crack the skulls of smart-ass kids! So I would pull out my baton and charge at the kid ready to expose his cracked skull off to the whole fucking school.


After the smart nerdy girls, who always sat up front, had tackled me, subdued me and kicked me out I’d return to the police station and my sergeant would call me into his office


‘Are you retarded?’ he would yell at me

‘Well you were the one who hired me, you tell me?’ I’d reply ‘plus why get angry if you are posing that as a question, by definition a questions should be something you are asking because you don’t know the answer and therefore you should attach no emotion to it at all until the answer is forthcoming, which of course I have not provided, so there’.


Not wanting to own up to their own stupid decision-making when choosing a new employee to be part of their police squad these ‘bosses’, as we imaginatively called them, would usually remain quiet and I’d go unpunished.


This ability of mine to twist the facts and the realities to my own advantage was a key element of my police work.


‘Case closed!’ you would often hear me yell.


Of course I never actually had any cases. ‘When you’re a rouge cop who plays by your own rules which match up neatly against their rules then they don’t give you cases’ I would say to myself when I questioned why once again they were making me stay in the office and photocopy paper work I’d seen other cops pull from the trash after hearing a ‘boss’ say ‘I don’t know, just make up something for him to do’.


Still ‘Case closed’ I would yell, because when I came to work I always packed a small suitcase in case I was sent out on undercover work, and I always packed light, so my suit case was ALWAYS easy to get closed, none of that sitting on it bullshit you see so many disgraceful over-packers do all the time. ‘Case closed’ hell yeah it was, again and again and again.

That’s why I often felt guilty after these assemblies. So often I would be kicked out by the nerdy smart girls before I had the chance to tell the kids about the importance of over packing.


‘Pack light’ I wanted to tell them kids ‘because when they kick you out of somewhere and your bag is packed lightly, the people kicking you out are way less likely to think “this is pretty heavy, maybe we’ll keep it in case it’s full of valuables” and instead will chuck it at you while you lie on the grass with a three twelve year old girls standing over you laughing!’


Is that an important lesson for the kids? Well you ask me – ‘Is that an important lesson for the kids’ I hear you asking. Hell yeah it is, ‘case closed’ you should imagine me saying, this time about the case of whether that is an important lesson for the kids or not rather than about closing my suitcase.


You see I don’t close cases any more. I have since been fired as a cop, and so no longer prepare myself for undercover work. Apparently somewhere in ‘the book’ it states that if you get kicked out of twenty seven school assemblies in one year then you get fired’. Personally, to be honest, as I cop I never actually read ‘the book’ I was too busy closing cases.