I felt the truck come to an abrupt stop. Sometimes this wakes me up, and sometimes it doesn’t. I was only half awake when I heard a loud male voice say, “Turn on your headlights… turn on your headlights…”

I heard Freckles say, “I did!?!”

Then I heard a male voice say,” Well, they aren’t working then.”

I said to myself, “Oh, hell no,” and got up grabbing clothes to throw on. I got up to see that an officer had stopped Freckles for an inspection.

She was out of the truck by then and I saw she was wearing one of her sweatshirts she collects from around the country. When she realized she was going to have to get out of the truck, she grabbed the first sweatshirt she could reach real fast. This happened to be the sweatshirt she bought from the city, Weed, California. It proudly proclaimed in big bold letters, “Weed, the high life.”

I realized then, “oh this is one of those realistic dreams,” and I figured I would step out of the truck and play along until I woke up.

Before I could get out, the officer jumps up on the drivers door step and asks the age old questions, “do you have any drugs, weapons, handguns, bazookas, grenades, nuclear weapons?”

He was digging through every compartment in his reach, and I quickly realized this is no dream. He asked me to step out and then continued his search of the interior of our truck. He was thorough, and another unit pulled up, lights on full display.

It stated, “Sargent” on the side, and he jumped out and said, “Hi! How are you?” As if we were at a barbeque on Labor Day.

I responded, “Pretty good, but I don’t think we have done well on this inspection!”

He talked in hush tones with the original officer who has completed his search of our truck. Then the original officer informed me our DOT number on the truck didn’t match any known DOT numbers on record. I responded, “Let me call my permits department, clearly there is a misunderstanding.”

I call our permits department, and we realized that he thinks the 7 is a 1 due to the font used, and he states we should change that as it is confusing. I inform our permit department they need to change the font they use on thousands of trucks because this officer doesn’t want to be wrong. They warmly accept the officer’s suggestion, and let me go with promises to bring that up at the next company suggestion meeting.

At this time, he lets us go due to frustration of not finding any drugs and/or commercial vehicle violations other than the minor problem of no headlights at all. We were extremely happy to discover that he did not issue us a violation for the headlights, just a confirmation that we would go straight to a truck stop and fix them (it was daytime and clear out). I have to say that we were very respectful and shared our everyday good manners. Say and think what you want, but that matters. These men and women of law enforcement do the best they can to enforce the law and make split second decisions based on the public’s cooperation and attitude.

However, Freckles is no longer allowed to wear that sweatshirt on the truck. The thing is, she will not bend to normal society rules, and although I admire that, life is easier with some minor wardrobe changes.