Here are the facts: 37 miles per hour in a 25 mile per hour zone. Hard to contest. And I'm not going to contest it, I just think it's unfair. Unfair largely because I was the sucker who was pulled over.
I am no stranger to speeding tickets. My first was shortly after I obtained my drivers license. I was in our family's giant conversion van driving someplace on the highway I shouldn't have been going. Our van was so old that the speedometer had stopped working, and my dad had developed some sort of algorithm to determine your actual speed, which I ignored and/or couldn't compute. Also, I was driving with the emergency brake on, which was never the same after. Dad didn't find out that was me until a decade later.
My second ticket, and the one that earned me the privileged of having my license revoked for 90-glorious-days, was due largely in part to a jackass kid at my school. There is only one entrance into my former high school, and one exit. About a week prior to my ticket, a student, whose father was on the School Board, darted out into the street after school in order to cross it. A young driver (who incidentally wasn't on a cell phone -- nobody but Zack Morris had one at this point in history) hit the boy, shattering his leg and warranting panic among the Bay Village Citizens. Fast forward a week from the accident, I was taking myself and my brother to school, crossed over a double-yellow line to get into the left hand turning lane, and a cop, who was waiting for anyone to even breathe wrong, pulled me over. In front of the entrance to the school, mind you, for all of my classmates to see. Glorious.
In the state of Ohio, if you have 2 or more moving violations before you turn 18, your license is revoked for 90 days. This earned me a trip down to juvenile court to appear before a magistrate, who I later find out is the meanest on the bench, and was in his worst mood in a while, and he showed no mercy on me. I was license-less for 90 days. 90 days of my senior year.
In my early 20's I got a ticket in Michigan on my way to visit my aunt and uncle. Everyone was speeding, and I think I was singled out simply because I was driving a foreign car, and I was a female (incidentally, I'm still a female). Because I was out of state, I had to either give them a $100 bond as collateral (and who exactly has one of those laying around in their car??) or give them my actual physical license, and then run all over Hell's Half Acre to get it back. I chose the latter.
Although one would think I had learned my lesson by this point, I still continued to speed. I think last night's ticket was the first since that Michigan one (although I had been pulled over before).
But here's the deal. I get the whole "Serve and Protect" thing. I get that where I got pulled over is a 25 zone for no reason perhaps than there are a lot of pedestrians in the way who can't seem to cross the street themselves!!?!?!?!!! The car next to me was actually going faster than I was, but since I was in the cop's radar first, I got the ticket.
On this stretch of Mayfield Road, I saw no fewer than 8 cop cars, just waiting to pull people over. I know that the economy is tough, and that officers are losing their jobs, just like the rest of us public-employees, but give me a break!
Because I am polite, and my parents have taught me good manners, I say "please" and "thank you" to everyone. Everyone including the officer who gave me my ticket for $155. My officer who kept the bright light shining in my eye the entire time, for no reason other than to make me nervous. My officer who took seventy ten thousand years to write up my ticket, making me think that there was some charge or ticket or something somewhere in my past that I had neglected and he was going to arrest me. My officer who was so young that he was wearing braces on his teeth. That man earned a "Thank You" as I signed my ticket last night, and not an "Eff-you" as I'm sure he's accustomed to.
I said it before, and I'll say it again, Thank you Cleveland Heights Police Officer.
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