Thought of the Day: The Misadventures of Felony Melanie

One of my young co-workers came at me first, "Mel, I think you'd better get out here."

I approached the reception area of my office and found a police officer at the front door. Outside there was the policeman's motorcycle accompanied by a police car with two more cops. In less than 5 minutes another two police officers showed up.

"Is this your vehicle, ma'am?" asked the motorcycle officer.

Then it hit me, Voldemort had reported the car as stolen.

Voldemort is the name we have bestowed on the woman my brother-in-law foolishly chose to marry six years ago. They are going through a messy divorce, and today I found myself right in the middle of it.

My brother-in-law had swapped vehicles with me a couple of days ago, because he needed the momvan to haul some stuff. What he didn't tell me was that during one of his messy court proceedings around mid-November, the court ordered him to turn over the car to her temporarily. He also forgot to disable the LoJack system allowing the police to find the car with little effort.

Two hours I was outside with a very nice officer, and in the end Voldemort ended up with the car. She has one that she talked her mom into buying for her, and another vehicle owned by my brother-in-law's company that she's refused to turn over violating her own court order.

The nice officer told me it was a good thing that they found me at work, because had I been driving the car, SoCal's procedure for pulling over a suspected carjacker is to force them off the side of the road, and with guns drawn make them lie on the ground to cuff them. I would have really been pissed had that happened, today I was merely inconvenienced and annoyed.

My co-workers got a kick out of the situation asking me what else I had been arrested for, and if I had a secret life I wasn't telling them about, and nicknaming me 'Felony Melanie.' They were also in awe of how calm I was in a situation where they would have completely freaked out and had a meltdown. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I'd prefer to say that I remain eternally amused at these weird life situations I always seem to find myself in. Beside, shit like this makes my blog worth reading.