You know what really grinds my gears?

[roadman]

Re: You know what really grinds my gears?

When road construction crews dig up and excavate different parts of sidewalk, alley, road in your neighborhood and leave all their equipment while the site lies dormant for several weeks. Only much later do they come back and repair their mess. Here's a thought...why not wait to dig it up until you're about ready to work on it/re-pave it?

Bingo, same thing is happening in my parents neighborhood.

Taxpayers $ used smartly.

[WaitTilNextYear]

Re: You know what really grinds my gears?

Bingo, same thing is happening in my parents neighborhood.

Taxpayers $ used smartly.

Well, it's the start of road construction season here in the Midwest/upper Midwest, so that checks out.

I feel like these crews go around and do a lot of jobs all over the place so I understand why some jobs can take a long time to get around to. What I can't understand, though, is why you would dig a road up in early May, if you're not gonna work on it again until July. While diverting traffic/parking etc for all the people who live nearby that whole time.

It's getting to the point where my whole neighborhood can feel like navigating a dungeon/labyrinth in a role playing game. I had to play a game of cat and mouse with a backhoe today just to get my car back into my garage in the alleyway behind my house.

[Fresh Tendrils]

Re: You know what really grinds my gears?

When road construction crews dig up and excavate different parts of sidewalk, alley, road in your neighborhood and leave all their equipment while the site lies dormant for several weeks. Only much later do they come back and repair their mess. Here's a thought...why not wait to dig it up until you're about ready to work on it/re-pave it?

Move the equipment. See if they notice.

[Blzer]

Re: You know what really grinds my gears?

Freakin' Guitar Center, man.

These are the promotional e-mails I got from them in like just the past five weeks:





Guess what they pretty much all say?

15% off non-sale items.

I'm not poo-pooing on having a coupon, but the constant e-mails and the titles of these things as if they'll do anything different than normal is just not an expected thing with these guys.

I mean on Black Friday they did 16% off, and that's the most I have ever seen from them. You're not going to get anything from these guys that is going to help you save much of any money here.

EDIT: By the way, the 25% off select gear is like guitar picks. I mean you aren't getting anything from that that you're really looking for. At least... not that I'm looking for:

SECOND EDIT: I'm also very aware that these are advertised coupons, and if you work with store managers and such you can wiggle your way into different deals. It's just the e-mails themselves that I'm specifically referring to.

[WaitTilNextYear]

Re: You know what really grinds my gears?

Move the equipment. See if they notice.

Man, why didn't I think of that? Surely the tractor, backhoe, steamroller, and 10-foot deep pits plus missing chunks of sidewalk and intersection are things I should simply move.

/s

[LambertandHam]

Re: You know what really grinds my gears?

Getting decently hungry at 2-3 am.

[EUBlink]

Re: You know what really grinds my gears?

What grinds my gears... and I'll be as neutral as possible here. Hold by obligatory after-shift beer. Ignore the two cold empties on the side-table.

We go into a low-income housing project last night on a gun call, with someone reportedly shot, possibly killed according to the anonymous 911 calls (burner phones); the residential area has a nicer, given name, but we and the residents all call it The Camp. As soon as our units enter the Camp, every single time without fail, we get "F--- the police!", "F--- the pigs!", "Bleed pig!" continually, among other things... from preteens. The older generations need say nothing, as their eyes do the talking just fine.

But back to the story, we're there on a gun call, and sure enough, there's a group of 40-60 people gathered at the end of one of the side streets. We normally roll in as fast as we can get there, but as fate would have it, I'm rolling in with five other units behind me. It's in my beat and I'm close by, so I was somewhat near. The crowd disperses, sprinting all directions. Everyone we interviewed either stated, "I just got here!", "I don't live here!", or better, "We ain't got no guns out here!" All lies.

The hoods of their vehicles are cold as I check one-by-one. The third apartment I check the hood of the vehicle on, two men stand inside the doorway wearing red bandanas (we've got a ton of hybrids now, but Blood is still somewhat dominant) and won't show themselves. In hind-sight, their hoods needn't be cold... they've each got a brick where there once was a tire on each of the vehicles. So I approach the apartment, call another unit and ask for consent to check their apartment... not for drugs, but for the welfare of the man/woman that we're now observing dark, thick puddles and runs of blood all over the ground and on the porch.

They decline entry, but as soon as they both step out on the porch to try and get us back, we pat each of them down to assure they're unarmed. Side-note, that pat-down is legal [and is wasn't a full-on search], considering the totality of the circumstances and our own department policy. Double side-note, it's public housing and we need no permission to be on the porches/property of the housing, per contracts signed by each tenant with the housing authority. Additionally, each apartment has a maximum-occupancy of four... most have 8-10 living in them. It's a cluster.

Back on topic, I get on the phone with Narcotics while one of my partners phones Homicide. Seeing this develop, they give consent. We enter the apartment to the strong smell of bleach... as in take-your-breath-away proportion. Floors are still wet. The mop is in the corner. But then we see blood on the back door handle and open it to find speed tire-tread marks leaving the back yard. The older man in the corner says, "She already gone. Y'all missed her". Sure enough, we contact the hospital which is about four miles away, and she's in the ER about to go back. We get other 10-8 units heading that direction while we secure this scene.

In the hallway closet, we find blood-soaked clothes and the obligatory bleach mop. All of the bleach has been dumped on the clothes.

At this point, we've been notified that we have a warrant on the residence beyond just the initial welfare check. We find shake-and-bake bottles for cheap meth hidden in the oven, several gallon mason jars containing over two-hundred nuggets of mid-grade marijuana, and about a quarter-brick of cocaine near the stove-top, sitting next to a disgusting cooking pot and four empty boxes of baking soda/powder where they'd been cutting it.

And yet still, while we are in this house where there is still blood splatter on the wall that they couldn't mop off, we have no witnesses. We have no one that even heard gunshots. We have holes in walls that appear to be from a firearm. We've found a 22LR that's been modified to full-auto, a Glock 17 and a Glock 43, all of which came back stolen and one tied to a separate violent case in another city.

And again, no one talks. We shut down the crime scene. No one enters. All those in the apartment are detained (not arrested) until investigators clear them, which doesn't take long.

Being primary, I have to report to the hospital and interview the victim while we can. She explains that three teenage females at that same apartment shot her and stole her iPhone and her purse. She can't identify them, said she'd never seen them. And then, as we must with all cases, I ask her, if we identify these suspects, are you willing to prosecute. She looks at me as if she's offended I even asked, and yells "No!".

Fortunately, with higher-profile and injury cases, the state can pursue prosecution itself, but at this point, we have no cooperation from the community (refusal of interviews, written statements, etc), no cooperation from the victim (she literally said she refuses to talk, going forward), no identity or witness accounts of the suspects, and nothing to go by but recovered bullets from her arm/chest/leg and the walls that don't match the firearms we found in the home. Recovered evidence has been sent off to forensics but it's going to take time, and seeing as there is no cooperation of the prosecution side from the victim, it's going to take even more time.

Four, closer to five hours of my shift, wasted. I had an idea it would turn out exactly how it did. Gears ground regardless.

[pietasterp]

Re: You know what really grinds my gears?

You should write a book, EUBlink. Or a magazine article. Or column. Or something.

Your writing is engaging and descriptive. I'd read your blog.

[EUBlink]

Re: You know what really grinds my gears?

You should write a book, EUBlink. Or a magazine article. Or column. Or something.

Your writing is engaging and descriptive. I'd read your blog.

Good times to be had, that's for sure. I'll just continue posting the grindings of my gears when they're ground. Ha.

[EUBlink]

Re: You know what really grinds my gears?

Some things grind my gears while making me just about as happy as Christmas morning (although Christmas Eve and Day suck for first responders because of suicides and homicides).

When I make a traffic stop, as soon as I step out of my unit, I hit reset. It's how I was trained years ago. My probable cause for pulling you over (running stop sign, failure to yield, etc) is just that. Probable cause. The chance of you getting a ticket at that point depends almost entirely on your attitude. Which brings me to a grinding of a gear.

Some people, more often women than not, will seriously start out verbal exchange with "Oh like hell you gonna..." And at that point, I'm most often gonna. Whatever it is I'm not gonna do, if I can do it legally, ethically, morally and with probable cause, it's going to happen. We gonna.

So recently, I was told what I wasn't gonna do. And I did it. A woman cut off a vehicle in traffic in front of me, no turn signal, flipped him off and almost caused a wreck with me right in the middle of it. I wrote her for a Failure to Yield While Entering a Highway, to which she unleashed a barrage of cursing toward me. I smiled, she signed the UTC, I went about my night, disconnected from her attitude as I do every contact. Never let your last situation effect your next. It can get you killed.

The next day, I've got a formal complaint against me from Mrs. Aintgonna. Review my bodycam with my Sergeant and we laugh and it's shredded and forgotten right there.

So don't grind gears by telling someone what they "ain't gonna" do, especially when they have the full authority to do it. It tickles. It brings the warm and fuzzies. And it brings the ink-on-paper that most of us don't really care to do. I hate writing tickets.

[l3ulvl]

Re: You know what really grinds my gears?

I've only been pulled over once in my life and I almost cried lol :o

[Blzer]

Re: You know what really grinds my gears?

I literally just got pulled over because my headlight was out. I was genuinely surprised that it was out; it must have gone out within the last 24 hours. What's interesting is that I believe I just replaced it in the fall. Maybe it's the wiring or something, not sure.

Anyway, I was very cordial, and the officer was as well. He borrowed my license for a while (asked for nothing else), asked if I was drinking (never once have heh), and after being at his vehicle for a while, he returned it and asked me to get it fixed. I will as soon as I am able.

Good cop. Most of them are. People really do give them a bad name much, much more than they are due. I say that coming from a thankless profession myself (though much less dangerous, but this year you wouldn't have known that).

[callmetaternuts]

Re: You know what really grinds my gears?

Like the posts before, most cops are regular people, not looking to start something and trying to protect others and themselves. People start with an attitude and it puts them on the defensive where they are worried about their safety. Sure, there are the outliers and bad apples as there are in any profession, but if people could just freaking be civil, a lot of this would go away.

[cusefan74]

Re: You know what really grinds my gears?

I've only dealt with 2 jerk cops in my life. One was a woman and she was just a b*tch to everybody. She stopped me while I was walking home from work one night at 2am and asked what I was doing. I told her, I just got out of work, I told her where I worked, and I am going home. She took my ID and wrote down all my info and said if anything was broken into that night she was coming to see me first. She kept asking things like how long have I worked where I worked? How long have I lived where I lived? I asked her what does it matter? She said because she wanted to know. So I told her and she finally let me go on my way, but not before I said that if she was so worried about me that she could just give me a ride home, but she wouldn't.

The other time I was driving late at night on a back road and I dropped my Mountain Dew cap on the floor, so I pulled over to find it and while I was bent over a cop pulled up, but I didn't know I never saw him. He banged on the door to my truck with his flashlight and scared the crap out of me. He asked me what I was doing and I told him. He asked me if I had been drinking and I said no. He looked in the back of the truck and saw a case of beer. He said you have open containers in the back and I was like yes I do. I said they are from a New Years party a couple months ago and I haven't returned the bottles yet. He then wanted to search the truck for drugs, so I'm like fine go ahead and started to get out and he said to stay in the vehicle. Then he asked me where I was going and said fine have a good night.

Now I have no problem being stopped and asked what is going on by either officer but, one don't give me a hard time and tell me if something happens you are coming to me first when I have never been in trouble with the law before or in the case of the second cop, don't bang on my door with your flashlight, that just made me mad. All other cops though, I have been nice and respectful and they have been the same to me.

So overall I have no problems with cops, they have a tough job and they don't need me making it any harder then it is. I feel like callmetaternuts, if people would be civil to them and respectful things would get better.

[dubcity]

Re: You know what really grinds my gears?

The sad thing is that it's such a loaded topic that you can't make a reasonable statement one way or the other without people looking at it sideways.