This morning I was on my way to the train station so I could take my usual morning connector train to the main line to the city where I work. I was on a back road in one of those snooty towns, one of those roads where the children make signs that say, "Please slow down for us!", but they don't really say that, they're really clever little cliche's that I'm not boring enough to think of right now. They wanted to build a Wawa gas station in this town, and all the little rich kids rallied and made signs that said, "Oil and water don't mix. No Wawa gas in our town!" I didn't see the point, but apparently the signage was all that mattered.

So I'm driving through this bullshit little town, and up comes a red light. There was a line of about a hundred feet before the red light blocking me from my tiny little left turn lane. I looked. No one was coming the other direction. I pulled into the middle, that scribbled mass of yellow lines that have no foreseeable purpose except to tell me, "You probably shouldn't be driving in me, but there's no other way for you to get to your left turn lane with all these cars going straight, so go for it, little Jetta." I took the bait and did what I have done a thousand times prior: drove on the yellow squiggles. Lo and behold out darts in front of me a man. My first instinct was to break. Why in the world would a man be trying to cross such a busy intersection in a road littered with sign-enforced crosswalks? Well this particular man happened to be a police officer, and he screamed at me in a most offensive way to pull over to the side of the road.

I did this, and then saw that he and his buddy had been hiding in a bunch of trees waiting for people like me who were seduced by this yellow lined road to take a ride on it, just this once. They waited for us, darted in front of us, and commanded us to pull over so they could write us one of the most ridiculous and purposeless tickets imaginable. I took the ticket gracefully with no hassle.
"How's your driving record?" he asked me.
"Perfect," I replied.
"No points?" he continued to question, and I assured him I had none. I thought perhaps he would be gentle and give me a warning, perhaps something other than a moving violation. Instead, he smuggly forced the ticket into my hand, informed me of the court date, and walked away. I told my hand to not force the ticket down his throat, to not punch him in the face, to not rip down those stupid signs in his town and shove them up his...well, I tried to calm down.

If this wasn't enough, his utter injustice and pompous ticket-writing, as I sat waiting for him to write up the ticket (which he did as slowly as possible, despite the fact that I had previously informed him - in response to his questioning - that I was headed for two trains, and his slowness, probably propogated by the signs telling EVERYONE to slow down, cost me my train and I was late to work), I watched his buddy meader over to the trees, stare at the road, and not do anything when TWO OTHER VEHICLES went down that golden road, took a trip down yellow line central. He did nothing as two other cars made the same mistake I did, only they weren't punished with a thousand dollar ticket.

Oh of all the rotten luck that it was me.