About ten minutes after sitting down at my desk this morning I received a call from my friend on the regional police force asking me a very important question:
“How’d you like to come have free alcohol?”
Never one to shirk my civic duty, I said, “Hell yes.”
The police needed test subjects to come and drink, and drink, and drink some more. After this a group of officers would administer field sobriety tests. It was part of a training program for them.
They administered a pre-test (blood pressure, eye tracking, pulse) to the eight volunteers and then the alcohol flowed. We had lunch. We played euchre, but the game stopped when our opponents could no longer focus on their cards. My partner and I won by default. We got to be good friends in the way only inebriated people can. All the while the supervising officers watched and kept us topped up.
By early afternoon we were deemed sufficiently pickled. The officers made us blow in the breathalyser to get our starting reading. Then they took us downstairs where the training officers conducted the tests. Three or four officers tested each of us. At the end the testing officers had to say how many clues we showed for being drunk and how much over the limit they estimated we were. All of us volunteers drunkenly cheered for ourselves when we earned high estimates over the limit.
At the end we all received the thanks of the city and a ride home in a police cruiser. It was a fun and interesting day. And now I must go to bed and sleep off my civic duty.
Dispatches from Obscurity 