Where Were YOU Last Night Around Midnight?

I guess I never really need to worry about running out of material for this blog, because my life always seems to provide something. Today my material comes from a call I placed to the Sheriff's office. Sometime overnight some absolute idiot thought it would be great fun to drive through our neighborhood and drive into every single stop sign and street sign, knocking them to the ground. We live in a pretty good sized neighborhood with at least 200 houses, so it's not like it only took this person 2 minutes to do all these misdeeds. And the direction the stop signs are knocked over at show that he (I'm just assuming here, although for all I know it was a woman who just couldn't take her 4 year old barking like a puppy for one more minute) had to turn around a few times to make sure he got everything. If you happened to live near a stop sign, your mailbox was taken down too. Perhaps your house was for sale? Then he drove into your yard and ran over the for sale sign. Clearly, this person was on something.

So anyway, being the socially responsible person I was raised to be, I called the non-emergency number for our Sheriff's department. After much confusion over who I should talk to, I got a lady on the line and told her that I wanted to report some knocked over stop signs in my neighborhood so they could be repaired right away. Over the next 10 minutes, she proceeded to ask me all sort of questions-about me. I'm not one to give a uniformed officer any attitude, so I dutifully told her everything she wanted to know-full name, address, DOB, sex, etc. Finally when she asked me what race I was, I asked her why she needed to know all this. She informed me they are required to get all of this information from every caller. Fine, whatever. I will comply.

Finally she got to the last question and asked what property of mine was damaged. My frustration level rising, I told her (again!) that none of MY property was damaged, I was just calling to make sure that the appropriate people were informed of the incident so everything could be repaired. I seemed to stun her with that news. "So you're not calling to report your property damaged?" she said. I replied once again that no, nothing of mine was damaged. "Then why did you call to file a police report?" she asked. I told her that I didn't want to file a police report (which it turns out is what I had been unknowingly doing the entire time), I just wanted to let someone know. She was quite incredulous that I would call in this information as I did not have property damaged. Finally, once she collected her wits, she informed me that several homeowners had already filed reports about their damaged property and that it was being taken care of. Why couldn't she have told me that when I first called?

It was a frustrating call, but I was happy to see when I pulled back into the neighborhood just 2 hours later that all the stop signs were already put back up (although most of them looked a little worse for the wear). The bad part is that unless someone sees someone driving in the neighborhood with a smashed in front bumper with paint all over it, the perpetrator will probably never be found. Luckily both the Army Man and I have alibis.