Yesterday we were eavesdropping on the conversation of a retired California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer.

"I didn't like to give tickets to these guys with the family along. You stop some poor guy in a station wagon, bald tires, five kids and the wife, everyone is crying. Why give him a ticket? He can barely feed them all. So I just gave him a lecture.

If I was going to give a lecture and there were other people in the car, I'd have the guy step out and away. No sense in humiliating a guy in front of other people. Some people didn't know when to shut up, though, they'd argue with me, and talk themselves right into a ticket. If I gave a lecture I didn't give them a ticket, and if I was going to write them a ticket, I never bothered to give them a lecture. I'd think to myself 'shut up, you're going to get a ticket now, your own fault.'

I always stopped the first car in a string of speeders because the ones following would say they were just keeping up with traffic.

There were those ones who would get so mad, I never understood why they got so mad. Went to court a lot of times, and I always won, but they'd come racing up and pass me at 85 miles an hour, so I'd pull them over. They'd be so angry and claim that I couldn't tell how fast they were going if they were coming up from behind. Well, of course I could tell how fast they were going, it's a matter of distance and time."

There were more stories, but my main thought hearing all this was to hope that if I get stopped for speeding it's by someone like this guy and they just give me a lecture.