Every once in a while something happens that makes you take notice of things.
These aren’t usually ordinary events, the kind of events that are part of your
everyday life. They are usually the type of events that are extraordinary, such
as being involved in a 10 car accident or winning the lottery and having more
money then you know what to do with. I recently had this kind of even and I was just
going to the ATM.
Now I know that one might think that going to the ATM is one of those mundane
thinks that doesn’t lead to more then an occasional tear or two when you realize you
barely have two nickels to rub together, but in this case the ATM was a lot more then
just a cash dispensing machine.
A few nights ago I went to go get a few bucks from the my bank for my wife to have
the next day. Now, the ATM I went to was one of those handy dandy drive through ATM’s.
In the case of this particular ATM, when you are performing your transaction you are
facing a lovely set of hedges that run along the sidewalk. These wonderful hedges force
you to make a hard right to get out of the drive through and head parallel along the
hedge to exit the parking lot. For a moment, please indulge me to invoke your imagination
a little bit. Imagine you are sitting in the driver seat of my car, and imagine that
your perspective is like that of a movie theatre screen. The camera shot is of driveway
for the ATM with the hedge in the background. Suddenly the camera begins to pull forward,
and slowly pans to the right and as it does it reveals that peering over the hedge is a
very scared looking police officer with his 12 guage shot gun leveled straight at you
above the hedge.
If you were able to follow along with my little trip into the cinema of the mind you’ve
now relived exactly what happened to me at 11:15 PM that night. Yes, there really was a shot
gun being pointed at me and no, before you ask, it wasn’t because I did anything other than
withdraw my money from the ATM.
The part of this story that was left out for you and myself prior to this moment in time was
that my bank was actually in the process of remodeling. So as not to upset their daily business
activities the construction was actually being done at night. Unfortunately for me some “law abiding
citizen” had seen the construction people and not knowing what was going on had phoned the police
to inform them that there appeared to be a bankrobbery in progress.
Now that I have caught you up on the background of the situation, I thought I’d throw down some
basics about what you should do if you find yourself in a similiar situation.
First, keep both hands visible at all times on the stearing wheel. I remembered this one from
driver’s training school and proceeded to yell at the officer through my closed window that I was
just getting money from the ATM. Once he gave me the OK to roll down the window I did and repeated
the statement.
The second thing to do in this circumstance is to be very agreeable. I instantly offered to
pull my car over at which point the officer was very happy to ask me to pull over by the
Wendy’s and wait there. I, of course, was more then willing to comply since it meant that I
would no longer have that aforementioned shot gun pointed at me.
From this point I was able to phone my wife, tell her I was going to be a little bit
late and watch the fun from a distance. Four squad quards seem to swarm on the bank. At the very
same moment a pickup truck also stopped by the bank, which apparently was occupied by the
head of the construction crew. Within moments the squad cars were gone and the officer who
had his gun trained on me came over and apologized at least three times and explained
the situation to me.
It all just goes to show that at any moment life can change. That change will happen without
notice, you won’t see it coming, and you will never be ready for it. Thankfully in my case this
turned out to just be another interesting anecdote instead of a tragic set of misunderstandings.
Oh yeah, happy 2003 everyone!
-WW