Today is my lucky day.
I had a date that went very well (I ended up asking out Megan, a.k.a. Rugby Chick, and she, to my unending astonishment, said yes), and when she eventually left, I called my buddies, who were out bowling in Skokie, and who were piss drunk and asked me to pick them up.
I said sure, so I headed out there, with a street name and a vague idea of where it was, so I started looking around for the street, not knowing exactly where it was, but knowing that if I hit the interstate I had gone too far.
So I hit the interstate, so I went to the top of the bridge so I could see oncoming traffic, then pulled a U-turn. I went through the traffic light I had just come through, and then I looked in my rearview mirror.
Police lights.
Oh SHIT.
I have never, ever been pulled over before, and I figured I was about to get busted for speeding, since I was about 10mph over the limit. So I pull onto a side street, turn off my engine, and pull out my license and insurance.
The cop comes up and I give the old “Evening officer…”, and he tells me that it’s illegal to make a U-turn on a bridge. He asks me if I knew that, and I tell him that I had no idea, because to be perfectly honest, I had no idea you couldn’t pull a U’ie on a bridge.
So he asks me if I have a clean driving record, and I tell him I’ve never been pulled over before. I apologize profusely for my mistake, and as he walks back to his car, I call my friends at the bowling alley and explain that I’ve been pulled over.
Fortunately, as I was hanging up with my friends, he comes up to me and says, OK, just don’t do it again (which, believe me, I won’t…I’m going to be paying through the nose for insurance with a clean driving record as is), and lets me go.
THANK FUCKING GOD.
I’m convinced that part of the reason he let me go is that I signaled before making my U-Turn, and made it at the top of the bridge, thus giving the indication that I thought it was legal to do so as long as I could see what I was doing and let other people know what I was doing, which is what you normally do when you make a U-Turn.
Of course, he may have just let me go because he didn’t feel like filling out the paperwork for a ticket. But whatever, I learned my lesson, no matter why he let me go.
Moral of the Story: Skokie cops are good people.