Sometimes you hear something so good that you don't want to forget it, for it may come in handy some day.
These may be called 'audibles,' a coinage of comic sportswriter Dan Jenkins, after the name given for changes-in-the-play-called where the quarterback, lining up for the snap from center, sizes up the opposing team's defense and decides he needs to change the play he called in the huddle. So he calls out an audible so that his teammates know what to do now that something has changed, like the next play.
This usage has carried over to other areas, male-female relations, for example.
She: My place or yours?
He: Well, if you want to fight about it, why don't we call the whole thing off?
An investigator friend and I were having coffee today at the Caffe Roma, across from the Hall of Injustice in San Francisco, where he told me the tale of an arrest where police undercover agents on stake-out see a car circle the block five times in the wee hours. When the car is stopped, two rocks of cocaine are found in the sleeping passenger's pants pocket. The cops write up the report claiming the rocks were found not in the pocket but on the car console, in plain view, thus roping in all occupants as joint possessors. The investigator's client was an immigrant who couldn't afford a drug conviction.
After several years of pre-hearing fooling around, the case is called and four cops show up in court, subpoenaed by the district attorney to establish probable cause, a good search, where they found the dope, etc.
My friend the investigator shows up in court with an old woman from Vietnam, the manager of the apartment building, the one the police claimed gave permission to enter a tenant's apartment.
One of the cops asks the P.I. who she is.
She is the person in the police report from whom you said you obtained consent to search the apartment of the defendant where more drugs were found, replied the P.I.
The cops looked at each other with some degree of muted surprise, apparently. Then they called the DA to confer outside. The DA then came in and moved to dismiss the case against everybody except the kid who had the cocaine in his pocket. They apparently realized that the game of consent-to-search was up when they saw the manager they'd never seen before.
My friend the P.I. was busy shaking his head over the wasted effort of the police in this instance and the need for a certain threshold level of basic honesty for the system to operate properly.
There's two things the system has trouble with: (a) lying on the part of the justice system operatives, from the complaining witness (usually the victim) to the cop to the juror, not to mention anyone else, and (b) craziness on the part of anyone.
Everyone is presumed sane in the Hall of Injustice, including the attorneys, so you can see the flaw in this system right off the bat.
I have a friend who is a psychiatrist. I ship the occasional client over to him in dire situations where the ordinary attorney-client ministrations threaten not to work.
But before I do, the client has to pass a test.
A person is put in the room with a bathtub full of water, I say, and given a teaspoon, a teacup, and a bucket and told to empty the tub. How would you empty the tub, is the question.
Most clients will say that they would use the bucket, except that the really paranoid ones, fearing a trick question, will sometimes pick the teacup or tea spoon.
Then I send them, with confidence, over to the shrink, secure in the knowledge that he can help.
Why?
Because most people would simply pull the drain plug, but I haven't actually seen any polling data.
"John, " I tell the good doctor, "psychiatrists have all the advantages over lawyers. You know going in that your clients are nuts while we lawyers have to figure it out each time anew, and we're not as well trained."
All of which leads up to the private investigator's take on his experience with the creative-writing cops:
"Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large organizations."
And that, friends, is the audible of the day.