For a brief period I considered becoming a cop myself. It was a brief period. As anyone who has ever employed me, lived with me, dated me, or possibly had any interaction with me, can attest, I am not one for following the chain of command. There is, at least within the BDSM community, a term for people like me: topping from the bottom. I discovered this term last year when one of the women at my uni was giving a talk on her experiences researching a BDSM community. Someone asked about bottoms who are not willing to relinquish control to their tops, and when she informed us of the term for this, Gary, the man who is solely responsible for my Australian invasion turned to me and said "Yes, we see that with some students, don't we?" It has become an ongoing joke between us. Well, maybe not a joke, but a reality over which we can share a chuckle.
I considered becoming a criminologist (whatever that is) for a longer period of time. I developed an obsession with serial killers and could often be found haunting the 'True Crime' section at bookshops. I showed up for my first day of orientation at uni completely convinced that criminology was what I would be doing with my life. And I left my first day of orientation completely convinced that it would not be what I would be doing with my life. On that day I chose a different path, and I've never looked back.
But the police force remained a point of intrigue for me. I like to understand how things work, especially social things (that's why I am now a sociologist, whatever that is), and I always wanted to get an inside understanding of how the police force works. I mean, they are the ones who are responsible for upholding whatever values it is us academic types decree should be upheld. How could you not be fascinated by this?
Unfortunately, my life hasn't really involved all that much interaction with the police (on duty police, anyways). And when it has, it's been largely dismissive, which I now know is because of an intense professional loathing of paperwork, something I can very much relate to. When it comes to filling out forms, I have severe academic syndrome: "What does this mean when it asks for my address?", "Which social construct do you want me to use to describe my pain level?", "None of these tick-box options reflect my response to this question, is there someone I can speak to about the inadequacy of your forms?"
I've only actually been inside a police station twice: once when I found a pager on the street outside of the police station and bringing it into the station seemed like a sensible thing to do, and once to file a police report when my bag was stolen. Though, the best prank I ever pulled did involve me and another guy pretending to have been arrested for not having the money to cover our bar tab in order to get back at a third guy for not leaving enough money to cover his share of the tab (we won't get into the fact that I was covering exactly $0 of this rather hefty bar tab).
Obviously, meeting Lady Cop was like discovering my own personal gold mine. I think I managed to keep my cool about just how awesome I thought it was to have a cop in my life, at least until the other day when she came by my office whilst on duty. Back when we were dating she had promised to pop in to see me the next time she had work to do in the city. So when she informed me that she would be coming into the city this week, I held her to her promise!
As the day approached, we joked about her coming in and interrogating me. As I thoroughly enjoy giving people the wrong impression about me, I was really looking forward to giving my colleagues something to be concerned with. The only problem is, neither of us are particularly good at keeping a straight face when we're playing a joke on someone; though she is infinitely worse than me. So when a helpful woman from down the hall directed Lady Cop into my office and I smiled and said, "What can I do for you constable?" She just said, "Nah, can't do it." SO DISAPPOINTING! And I was really looking forward to heatedly calling her 'cuntstable'. Oh well, there's always every other day.
Fortunately, the rest of her visit proved to be entirely awesome. My favourite part was when Gary happened past my office as we were talking. The look of concern and alarm on his face definitely made up for LC's inability to carry out our little joke. So after she inspected my office, violated my fish, and refused my offer of a beer, she took me for a spin around the block in her police car! I sat in the front, and still people were looking into the car going "Who is that criminal?" Suddenly cars that would zoom through the pedestrian crossing outside my office were stopping, as were pedestrians as we tried to turn the corner. We went into my favourite lunch place, which was filled with construction workers. And while I was beaming from ear to ear to be getting a police escort to lunch, she was looking around nervously and saying, "You know that most people don't like the police right?"
We sat in her police car outside the front of my building for a bit, chatting and testing out her handcuffs. She waved her OC spray at me and pretended to yell at me whenever someone walked past the car. Several people from my uni walked past, though I'm not sure if any of them realized it was me in the cop car. Oh well! That's why I got pictures!
It was a good play date!
**Edit: Gary just popped by my office to inform me he thought I was being arrested for shoplifting. What a mundane crime to be suspected of! Although, perhaps he figured I was shoplifting because I am a poor student and will therefore let me work for him again??
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