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I’d like to see Stephen King or Tom Clancy work under the conditions that I do!

Police Blotter

Police were dispatched to the alley behind a downtown bar. A bar patron had reported finding two males who appeared to have been badly beaten in the alley but was unsure how it happened. When I say this was reported, I mean this was reported to the bartender in the brief period of time between the ordering of the drink and the receiving of the change. No further information was offered as the patron (drink in one hand, change in the other) went about his own business immediately thereafter. The bar tender called 911 and in an abundance of caution requested that police and paramedics should both be dispatched for the two casualties. Police arrived first and discovered that both of the casualties in question were back up on their feet and squaring off with one another. Neither looked as though they had been beaten in so much as they both looked like they had both fallen. Police then witnessed a re-enactment by the combatants that explained the whole thing.

Much in the way that a spinning top may only remain upright while it is (as the name clearly implies ... ) spinning - these two were only able to remain perpendicular while they were actively lobbing haymakers at one another ... but landing not-a-one-of-‘em. Also like tops, the very instant that they lost the benefit of the momentum of the centrifugal force that was keeping them (more or less) 90 degrees, they too did the horizontal bop like a pooped whirligig. (... Oh, stop the paragraph! I can’t imagine Tom Clancy or Stephen King have to work under conditions like these. I’m trying to write this paragraph - for the eighth or ninth time - while my 5 year old and two year old daughters are karaoke-ing all of the songs from Ella Enchanted between fights over who gets the microphone. Of course, Dora the Explorer is still loudly singing her “We Did It” song on the TV behind them and then there is the amplified keyboard given as a - seemed like a good idea at the time - Christmas gift. I give up. I can’t end this paragraph. For what it’s worth, it was going to be some reminiscence about a fight I watched as a kid, at a school for the blind in Edmonton, and how those two blind guys were far more accomplished as pugilists than these two knuckle-heads! ... Oh well!).

Some people put way too much faith in technology. One such man was rescued recently by a couple of snowmobilers. He was relying upon his GPS to guide him down a local side road en-route his destination. He chose to believe the version of the road, that three satellites in semisynchronous orbit overhead were transmitting to the small screen of his dash mounted GPS device instead of the data provided by the two eyeballs in geosynchronous orbit around his nose. The result was his continuing southbound through the trees, down a long steep embankment and ending at the point just before the lake, where the trees no longer yielded to the vehicle, but stopped its continued decent. It was at that point that the man’s GPS acknowledged what his own eyes had told him seconds earlier; that a sharp right turn was required to continue the trip. I’m told that about a half hour later, some snowmobilers noticed a car parked on the edge of a frozen lake, at the base of a steep, roadless hill and was signalling a right turn.

A TELUS operator was getting strange and worrisome calls from a Ponoka telephone number. The caller was actually an automated message reporting in an ominous sounding tone, “the time is (whatever the time was ... at the time). An alert condition 4 exists at this location. You have sixty seconds to call back”. This dire (but ambiguous) warning prompted the TELUS operator to call 911. The 911 operator dispatched same to the Ponoka RCMP but also provided the police investigator with some other telephone numbers associated to the one that was originating the sinister sounding warning. The member called one of those numbers and spoke with a woman who cleared up the whole thing. The automated call out was part of a low temperature alarm in the chicken barn which was designed to call a preprogrammed phone number (though not “0”) to alert the chicken ranchers to the situation. Now, to me, that was merely interesting. What really fascinated me was this: When I call a TELUS operator, I embark upon a long and maddening journey, marked intermittently by a series of “please hold(s)” and “press 1(s)” but a call from a couple of chilly chickens goes right through. Hmmmm.

If you have information about any unsolved crime or ongoing criminal enterprise, call the Ponoka RCMP at 783-4472. You can also call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS or now leave tips anonymously on-line at www.tipsubmit.com. If this is the kind of environment that you would like to work in, we are hiring. Check us out at www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca or call 1-877-RCMP-GRC for information about the application process.