I'll 'homeland security' you!
The town next to mine has a big power plant/factory thing... I'm not entirely certain what they do, but I think it's got something to do with both our water supply and local power supply. It's got great big smoke stacks and high gates and the like.

Anyways, we were driving around one night (two cars worth of us) when we managed to get turned around and lost. We didn't know the exact area we were in, so both cars pulled over into a short, wide driveway-like thing in front of a gate, so that we could argue with each other about where to go and so we could call for directions without driving off the road.

After about 5 minutes two police cars pull up to us. They got out their portable spotlight things (not flashlights, those big arclamp devices) and shone them in our eyes. Then they asked us, very, very seriously, just what we thought we were doing there.

We were all in high school, and the sort of kids who weren't ever on the wrong side of the law, so we started cringing and dithering: We're so sorry sir, we just pulled over because we're lost, really sir, we don't know what we did but whatever it was we're sorry...

Cops looked at us very sourly and strictly, and said, in Voices of Doom, "Alright, but we're going to drive by again in 5 minutes and if you're not gone you're going to be in trouble."

Turns out we had pulled up in front of the main gate to the power plant. This wasn't too long after 9/11, and apparently the government had alerted all law enforcers that terrorists might be targeting water supplies. Which was what this plant was involved in.

Of course, if they had really tried to arrest us, they would have seen that all of us were US citizens, local high school students, and more than half of us were Jewish. So it was pretty unlikely that we would have been terrorists.

Ooooh well.
( TheFelineAnarchist, Thu 8 Jan 2004, 20:03, Reply)