| Monday, September 11, 2006 |
| Be wary when awarding 'the finger'! |
So, back onto a totally frivolous line of thought that is more typical to me than musing over theology versus evolution: my brush with undercover police now two weekends ago.
I went to the Eskimo Joe concert two Fridays ago with the work girls Rose, Frieda, Felicity, Katie and Carmen, plus Julian, the ridiculously rich South African who I also work with, who is dating Frieda. Carmen had a little get-together at her house first, as it was her birthday, and made us and her other friends all cosmopolitans (she’s a huge sex in the city fan). Katie, Rose and Felicity were all not drinking, and had brought their cars. Carmen was going to the concert with one of her other, non-work friends, and after some discussion Katie, Rose and Felicity decided that only Rose would drive, as there was no point taking three cars when there probably wouldn’t be much parking. The only problem was that there was five of us, plus the driver, and only four passenger seats in the cars. I was the only one who thought this was a problem. I know, I am totally conservative! But this concert was in my home suburb and I was pretty confident that it would be crawling with police. My concerns were brushed aside, and in we piled to Rose’s old ford. There were three of us in the back, Julian sitting in the passenger seat, with Frieda sitting between his legs on the floor.
We made it to the concert with no problems, and after the concert we zipped around to my house so we could all go to the loo (there was a distinct lack of toilet facilities at the concert, at least, toilet facilities that were not awash with urine and I hate to think what else). We then went to a takeaway shop for a few potato cakes, and then were backtracking back to Carmen’s house so that Felicity could pick up her car and take us into a new nightclub, as Rose had had enough and wanted to go home. Frieda had tired of sitting between Julian’s legs, and had piled into the back with Katie, Felicity and I. I was the one without a seat, though, being swashed on the edge of the backseat behind Rose, the driver. I was supposed to be lying down hiding the tell-tale fourth head in the backseat, but I had to keep popping up to give Rose directions as I was the only one from the Northern Suburbs in the car and therefore the only one with any idea of where she was going. Rose missed three potential turn-offs to Carmen’s house, and ended up having to do a u-turn and go back. As we were driving up Carmen’s street, a car up ahead of us went straight ahead through an upcoming roundabout. As we started to go through the roundabout, another car came charging up on our left side and started to go through, then saw us and braked, leaving their bonnet protruding all the way over the give-way line. Luckily, Rose wasn’t driving very fast, so she was able to narrowly avoid crashing into the front of this car who had failed to give way. We were all going ‘Oh My God!’ and I (betraying my Northern Suburbs origins horribly) did the natural thing and gave this car that had so narrowly missed ploughing into us ‘the finger’.
The car then turned behind us and flicked on these little blue and red lights that were in the front grill. “Shit! They’re police!” I yelled over everyone’s continued chat and laughter over our near miss. “What?!” “They just flicked on their lights!!!”
Rose pulled over, later relaying that all that was going through her head was ‘here goes my license, here goes my license.’ I laid down on Felicity’s lap, but no attempt was made to cover me as Rose had said ‘they know, don’t attempt to hide it.’ Given that I had been sitting up the entire time through the whole near miss, I had then proceeded to give ‘the finger’ and I was even the one to be looking out the rear window and see that they were undercover cops this seemed a fair assumption. I was pretending to be unconscious however, as we had planned at the start of our journey that if caught I was to be unconsciously drunk and Rose simply had to get me home.
Rose gets out of the car, positions herself over the back window effectively screening me from the policeman, and then does an award-winning acting performance. Honestly, the girl should be on the big screen. Or work for the secret service.
“You scared me so much!” she says to this young male plain-clothes police officer. The female driver stayed in the car.
“Sorry about that, but we were chasing a car.”
They chat a bit more, but I can’t hear what’s going on as Felicity has now covered my head with my jacket. I know he’s checking Rose’s license. Everyone still in the car suddenly realises that as well has having an extra person in the car, not one of them is wearing a seatbelt, and put these on as surreptitiously as possible.
Then Rose opens up the back door, leaving my backside poking out for all to see. I was kind of crouched down behind Rose’s seat, turning to my left lying most uncomfortably on Felicity’s knees, which were also crammed in behind Rose’s seat. Rose puts her hand on my back and kind of leans over me, hiding my huge bum, saying loudly ‘Everyone give me your ids. He wants to check your ids.’ And then hissing quietly ‘he doesn’t know you’re there Cec, cover her up, throw jackets, bags, anything on her.’
Rose gets out holding the ids, slams the door and positions herself back over the window. “My friends think you’re hot.” she announces, “they want to know if you’re single.” Honestly, the girl is a bloody marvel. “Just tell them I’m taken,” the cop says. Meanwhile, there’s a massive flurry in the car to cover me with anything they can find, and throw a handbag on top. I am crouched down, doubled over behind the car seat in an even smaller amount of space than I had previously, my head pressed up against Felicity’s knees, as Frieda, Katie and Felicity have shuffled over on the back seat to make it look more normal. “Oh no!” Katie exclaims. “He’s going to find out that I have a court summons!” Katie was caught driving with an expired license.
Rose gets back in the car, and starts up the car. “Get smaller Cecilia,” ‘He’ll look through the window when he brings the ids back,” she mutters. Regretting eating that potato cake, I am scrunched into the most uncomfortable position of my life, one ankle doubled back underneath me causing an amazing amount of pain. “Why did he want the ids?” someone asks. “He said it’s to see who’s ‘out and about’ on a Friday night, and the info will be destroyed at the end of the night.”
He comes back and passes the ids through the window Rose, and saying ‘thanks, have a good night.’ Rose drives off, with no idea where she’s going, as I’m unable to give her directions. She just drives, and drives with everyone laughing from sheer relief, except me, who has three coats and a couple of handbags on my head, and is slowly suffocating/passing out with pain from my ankle. I had to yell so loudly ‘CAN SOMEONE PLEASE TAKE THESE COATS OFF MY HEAD??!!’ before Felicity remembered me, and did so.
So, that was our brush with possibly the stupidest undercover cop ever. There we were, no seatbelts, extra person in the car, and he didn’t even look in the window. He didn’t even check for open alcohol, the way cops always do if they see a car full of young people. And I had given them ‘the finger.’ He had no idea that we were doing anything wrong. And then I got extremely annoyed, because he had had the audacity to almost crash into the side of our car, then pull US over and check the ids of everyone in the car (sorry, the ids of everyone visible in the car).
Thank goodness, as Katie and Frieda joked, we hadn’t given him five ids when Rose had come in to get them!
* * * *
Quick update on the Jess situation: she’s contacted me since, in tears because she can’t do a job application for a teacher’s aide position. And I mean REALLY in tears. Damn that dratted depression. I was most hard-hearted, and refused to do it for her, the way I’ve been doing all of her other job applications for the past three years, and re-doing her resume at least twice a year. I even did a job app and resume for her mum earlier this year. Despite her sobbing about how stupid she is, and what a bad mother she is, not spending ‘quality time’ with Maddy, and how she just can’t do it I maintained that she had to have a go at it herself first, then I would check it over and ‘fix’ it (i.e. rewrite the entire thing). I hate to admit it, but I was influenced by how annoyed and disturbed I am still about her whole ‘earth is only 60,000 years old’ bizzo, and I think that by insisting that she have a go at doing this job app herself, it’s the beginning of me beginning to cut the ties between us. I offered to print out the previous job applications that I’ve done for her, for her to use as a guide (she’s lost them all plus her resume), but I refused to take them to her house like she wanted me to, saying most firmly ‘I’ll leave them sitting here for you, and you can drop by any time you like to pick them up as it’s school holidays so everyone is at home barring me.’
But, realistically, I’m not going to be in Hobart forever. I have two more years at uni and then 2009 will most likely see me employed on ‘mainland’ Australia, due to a total lack of fulltime permanent jobs in my area down here. It’s better that she learns to do these things for herself now, while I’m still here to ‘check’ them. |
posted by Cecilia @ 4:34 pm  |
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| 9 Rantings: |
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I think that you are doing the right thing with her - she needs to learn to stand on her own two feet, and you are not cutting her off completely just starting to make the relationship more balanced. She cannot rely on you to do everything for her and this way she should learn something too.
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whats a potato cake?
i hope youre un-squashed by now!
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it's funny that they pulled you over even thought they were in the middle of a chase. BTW: This is Dooug but I am on the new blogger beta and can't leave comments on a non-beta account.
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Was it a cop we know? WAS he hot, from what you saw through a hazy screen of handbags and coats? Oh dear, that put me in a good mood for the start of the day :)
Jess (it's so weird you call her that, considering) is 24. If she can't write a resume and job application by now, what has she been doing?? You're utterly doing the right thing by making her do it herself - it's obviously time for her to grow up
And Monkey? Potato cakes are EXCELLENT. Basically fat slices of potato, battered and fried. So yummy. So bad for you
Ceci, what are we doing, Adult Ed-wise? My friend wants to know if we're still doing Bollywood classes, as she's keen, but she also wants to know if we want to do rowing (meehhhh-m'reeeees!!!)
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DF and Bug: glad you don't think I'm being too harsh with Jess becauser I feel like an absolute rotter!
Doug: They had well and truly lost the car they were chasing by the time they had almost crashed into us. But still, you would think that trying to find them would be more important than pulling over a car load of people who weren't doing anything wrong (that they noticed!).
Monkey: DON'T YOU HAVE POTATO CAKES IN THE UK? You poor, poor people. Bad weather and no potato cakes!
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I think potato cakes are similar to our french fries. doug
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No, french fries are just thin hot chips (called 'shoestring' chips here if you really want to get technical) - they're McDonald's fries, right? Potato cakes are roughly round, thin, slices of potato, which are then covered in batter and deepfried.
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And they are very, very good
(although WHY do mainlanders insist on calling tbem 'potato scallops'? Scallops are seafood. Weird)
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oh, ok. they do sound nice though.
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I think that you are doing the right thing with her - she needs to learn to stand on her own two feet, and you are not cutting her off completely just starting to make the relationship more balanced. She cannot rely on you to do everything for her and this way she should learn something too.