Park 'n Wait Drama

SO, I pulled into the Park and Wait lot at SL Int'l just in time for the curtain to go up.

Ahead of me was a grey SUV parked in the front row.

Up pulls an airport police SUV and out gets the driver. He approaches the grey SUV while his hand was on his sidearm. The driver of the grey gets out and assumes the position up against his own vehicle. Soon, the officer calls for back up and waits for a second car to arrive.

The officer takes the grey driver through a field sobriety test, first demonstrating the ballet moves and then watching the grey driver perform same. (He passed every test, by the way.)

The officer walks to the grey SUV, reaches inside and retrieves some long aluminum cans. He walks back to his own vehicle and places these cans on his SUV hood. (Dash-camera footage.)

Any guesses yet what the charges will be?

It gets better. The second officer has all the while been chatting with the passenger in the grey SUV while the testing has been conducted. Now, the first officer turns his attention to that passenger. Out of the grey SUV steps a young woman. She adjusts her clothing as she is led tiptoeing back to the police SUV by officer #2. She is handcuffed and placed into the police vehicle and the door is shut on her.

Still wondering about the charges?

Officer #3 (Sarge) pulls up, wearing stripes on his uniform sleeve. Sarge starts pantomiming to the other officers and points up to a tall pole and then throws up his hands. At the top of that pole was ---you guessed it--- a security camera. Apparently, while they were parked in the lot, this twosome had been up to several illegal activities in that grey SUV and it was all caught on camera. The grey driver kept asking the officers to be more specific about where exactly the camera was. Once he spotted it he just shook his head.

The next scene was an episode of the keystone cops. I can only describe it as three (and soon four) airport police officers darting from vehicle to vehicle, searching high and low through handbooks and manuals to find the proper statutes with which to cite this couple. Flipping through page after page for a good ten minutes, they decided to settle on something and issue the driver a ticket.

Meanwhile, with the officers distracted in their research, the young woman sitting in the police vehicle was saying things (silently mouthing things) in the direction of her companion who was leaning up against the hood of another police SUV next to her. He, in turn, was telling her (with his own mouthing and gestures) that she was going to be hauled away while he himself was totally "{insert expletive here}".

In the end, the grey SUV driver signed for his ticket. He was instructed to take his tall aluminum cans and dump out the contents in the nearby shrubery. He complied and got back into his vehicle. (His female companion was taken away by officer #1.) As the grey driver began to pull away himself, he dropped another can and it rolled under his vehicle. He threw the SUV in park, got out, picked up the can, walked back to the driver's side door and, realizing that there was still a police officer standing behind him watching, tipped the can upside down and shook it back and forth to reassure the officer it was empty. Then, instead of tossing it in the trash, like any thinking animal would do, he tossed it in the back seat of his grey SUV, got in and drove off toward the pick-up lanes of the airport. (Open container laws are such a bother...)

The charges? Open container, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, lewd acts in a public place....... (remember the security camera???)

It was quite an entertaining way to kill my 45 minute wait. And I had a 2nd row center seat for the entire show.

People do some really stupid stuff to screw up their lives, don't they.