A police officer pulled alongside me tonight and made me laugh . The sight of this officer made me remember a night about nine years ago. Patrick was an ever-so-curious four year old and I was a hard-working middle school vice-principal. It wasn't uncommon for me to go back to work in the evenings, and on occasion I would take Patrick with me. I'd buy him a coke and he would play around my office while I filled out reports or worked on the computer master schedule.

On this particular spring evening I was deep in thought as I punched at my old 486 PC. I was bedeviled by a scheduling problem. Why wouldn't it work? Patrick sat on the floor sipping his Coke. As I stared at the columns of numbers I barely noticed Patrick climbing underneath my rather large desk. Whats the harm, right?

What I had forgotten was my "contraband box" that I kept under the desk. In that box was the forbidden items confiscated over the course of the school year. "Juggs" magazine, "Penthouse" magazines, cigarettes, pagers, lighters, pornographic playing cards, "fart spray", noisemakers, and various other items. As I pondered how to balance out those math sections, Patrick perused the forbidden box right under my feet. What did he find?

He found a set of metal handcuffs and promptly locked one on his little wrist. No big deal...they were toy handcuffs right? I did notice that there was no key to be found. I started the computer whirring with my latest schedule changes and turned my attention to the cuffs. I twisted and turned them....they didn't budge. I found a screwdriver....no luck. For 30 minutes I tried to wrestle those cuffs off his little wrist and only succeeded in making them tighter. Damnit! What to do?

Who better to remove handcuffs than the police? I called the police station and the snickering female dispatcher told me that they would be happy to help. I loaded Patrick in the car, drove away, and heard....another click! He had now handcuffed himself to the door handle. That cuff wouldn't come off either. So as I pulled in front of the police station, I now had to go inside and explain my dilemna. Every cop in the place came out to take a look. All of them were laughing. A few good jokes were cracked about handcuffs and child-rearing. A few of my students who happened to be walking by stopped to check it all out. The ring of handcuff keys was held by a sergeant who was out on patrol. We all stood outside and waited fifteen minutes for him to return. A nice little crowd had gathered by this point and I was pretty red-faced. The sergeant arrived, quickly managed to unlock the cuffs, and we were on our way.

I hadn't taken the small town press and the police scanner into account. They didn't have a name but the local paper had gotten the basic story over the scanner. The storyline began, "somewhere in town there is a very embarassed dad". The article ran for several paragraphs. Still, no one knew it was me, right?

Janet, my boss and friend, had other ideas. In our first faculty meeting in August she passed out photocopies of the article to the entire staff and slyly let them know who the culprit was. Just a couple of weeks ago, one of the teachers reminded me of that incident!

Hey, it could've been worse. It could've been my wife! ;)

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