This past Tuesday Mandy and I car pooled to work, and at the end of the day we ended up going to eat dinner at Mancino's. On the way out, Mandy suggested that we go get some ice cream, so we headed out to Dairy Queen. It was cold and dark, but one does not argue about ice cream. Brownies, maybe.
We pulled up to the drive-thru window, and the kid running it asked us to pull around. He seemed kind of bothered by something. We thought that maybe their ice cream machine had broken or they were out of those little colored sprinkles or something. We pulled around, and he told us that he couldn't serve us at the moment because some guys were inside that were freaking him out. Perhaps they were upset and yelling about not enough oreo cookie pieces in their blizzards. That always bothers me. Apparently they were causing enough of a scene that he had called the police.
This scene from the television show Cops ran through my head. There was this drunk guy at McDonalds knocking sodas out of other customers hands and screaming. I believe that he may have ended up getting hit with a taser. Though that may have been interesting to witness, we wanted ice cream, and we were probably safer driving away than hanging around to find out what was really going on.
As we were slowing down at the stop sign to pull out, two police cars were headed down the road with their lights off. I realized that whatever was going on inside wasn't a big deal because they didn't seem to be in a hurry. I waited at the stop sign for 10 or 15 seconds because I was turning left, and the police had the right of way. But they just stopped and sat there. I assumed at that point that they were waiting for me to pull out so that they could pull in- perhaps I was pulled over too far and it made it hard for them to turn.
Well, they were just sitting there because the kid inside hadn't called the police. What he meant by "I just called the police" was really "I hit the hold up alarm to the drive-thru." He seemed to fail to make that important distinction.
I decided to pull out to let the police in, and as I did, one of the cars rushed passed me and blocked me in from behind while the other turned in front of me and turned on his lights and siren. This was starting to turn into a different eposide of Cops than the one I had in mind. At first I thought the officers were going to just ask me if I knew what was going on inside, but I realized that was not the case when they jumped out and immediately tried to open my car door.
I didn't really even get a chance to roll down my window to tell him my wife just wanted a chocolate cherry blizzard. He didn't seem too interested. I unlocked the door for him thinking maybe he had an aversion to talking to people through windows but had a hunch that was wrong when he told me to exit the car slowly with my hands above my head. The whole time I was thinking, "You don't need your hand so close to that gun. No quick movements, no quick movements."
For some reason they let Mandy just sit in the car while I had to put my hands on the roof and get frisked. Half way through the frisking and responding to all sorts of fun questions like, "Do you have any weapons or sharp objects," he found my work id badge, which I was still wearing. It just so happens that not very many elementary school teachers are usually involved in armed robbery because he shouted to his partner, "Hey, this guys a teacher. You're a teacher? Somehow I don't think that this guy just robbed Dairy Queen."
After again explaining I had no weapons, I was able to tell them that the guys they were looking for were still inside probably yelling about the surcharge for extra scoops of blizzard toppings. The officer let us go, and needless to say, we didn't end up getting any ice cream that evening.