Feel Better About Your Bad Decisions

Every so often you read one of those stories that represents a string of very boneheaded decisions that can make you laugh, incredulously — which decisions would unhinge your world had their consequences happened to you. Hopefully, you haven’t made any such decisions, or a string of them, like this young woman did.

The story involves a highway patrol car pulling over a suspected intoxicated driver. But it doesn’t involve that driver. It’s the car behind that one and the cop car.

Here is the sequence of decisions a young woman and her carful of friends made. First, they drank and drove. She then drove without any of them paying particularly close attention, so that when the patrol car pulled over the first suspect, she ploughed into the patrol car.

This might be the first indication of very very bad karma. But it continues: Her next decision was to try and get away.

I’m not going to say it’s ever, ever, ever a good idea to try and pull a hit and run, but it is especially a bad idea if you are 1) intoxicated, and 2) on snowy roads in St. Cloud, Minnesota, when you 3) hit a police car, which 4) has a radio connecting it to lots of other police cars who can 5) all join the chase, too.

She ended up in a snow bank. But wait! The bad decisions don’t end there.

She was driving on a suspended license. And she ran a stop sign, before she ran into the snowbank. Her friends then tried to run away on foot. They got caught, too. How many bad decisions is that?

I imagine the whole thing like a comic scenario out of the movie Fargo, only with less blood. (Which, frankly, is the best thing about the whole event: nobody apparently got hurt.)

She’s 22 and St. Cloud is a college town, so it might be that they were college kids out partying before they went home for Christmas break. Can you imagine coming home from fall semester with that story for the folks?

Maybe not a good time to ask for an allowance increase to cover the higher cost of student life.

No word about the first driver who got pulled over. I like to think he or she was sober, and watched the whole business unfold. You can read the whole article here.

As for the drink and hit a cop car and run off to drive into a snowbank driver: I hope her license is now gone for a good long while. I hope the judge looks down over the bench at her, askance and frowning, then advises: it is time for you to become very well acquainted with all relevant bus schedules.