Some of my favorite moments...

...from traffic school. Yes, it's true, even nice, good-looking, intelligent people with perfect driving records can get speeding tickets. For instance, I got one this summer doing 18MPH over the limit trying to get to a canoeing place on time. I mean hey, who likes to be late for canoeing? After Robocop pulled me over, he didn’t even ask me why I was going so fast or if I even knew why he pulled me over. He just gave me a ticket, made some mechanical whirring sounds, and stomped back to his cruiser. Being pulled over by an IRS agent with IBS would have been a more personable experience.

Because nearly doubling the speed limit is bad, I had to go to traffic school (a good 4 months later, so that I could really associate the incident with the punishment). Our instructor was a really special guy, so I thought I'd share some of my favorite quotes from the evening with you, along with my interpretations of what he was actually saying:

Instructor: "My style of teaching is to use a lot of lectures. I find this to be very effective."

Translation: I bore people professionally, and I am very good at it. Veeeeery good.

Instructor: "Here you see two identical rosters. One is a photocopy of the other. This means they are the same. They are duplicates because we need two copies. Please sign both so that we have two copies that are identical."

Translation: All of my brain's representatives are serving other functions. I'll say the same thing over and over to fill time, and try my thought again later.

Instructor: "The road can be a dangerous place. Everyone needs to just flow with it and love your neighbor. Let's try it, what do we have to lose?"

Translation: I forgot what the DMV told me to say here, but who can argue with loving your neighbor? I think I'll have cheeseburgers for dinner. Yeah, and some of those fries that you make in the oven. Who does those? O'reida? Yes, I think I'll have some O'reida fries. Is C.O.P.S. on tonight? I love that show. Mmm...crispy.

Instructor: "This is the part of the class that I talk about traffic laws. I don't like to spend much time on it though."

Translation: Cleary these people know what all of the laws are, since they all broke at least one of them. Also, if loving your neighbor is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

Instructor: “Now, I must confess, there is something that I do when I’m driving that isn’t against the law, doesn’t make me a bad driver, and I probably wouldn’t do somewhere else. Sometimes I sing along with the radio. This isn’t bad, and it's not wrong, but I do it sometimes and it can be distracting.”

Translation: Actually, what I really do is dress up in drag and blast my Tina Turner and Cindi Lauper mix tapes while lip syncing and putting on makeup.

While this isn’t illegal either, it should be.

Thanks for taking this magical journey with me through the gumdrop forest and into traffic school.

--Andy
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