How Getting Arrested Made Me a Better Accountant

I had my first run in with the cops my freshmen year of college.  It was a cool night, and the road was seemingly empty.  Giggling in the smokey hotbox of my friend Rebecca’s Silver Honda Accord, I could still remember the 30mph sign under the full moon.  My Sai friend dreaming of things in the back seat with a red pill bottle in his pocket.

My last thought before everything went south was “we can die going 30mph…”  It was at that point that I realized, I was pretty high. I was sapped out of my trance when the red and blue lights started flashing behind us.

The cop started talking through the speaker of his cruiser.  He sounded like robocop with a thick southern accent.  He bared through the microphone, “pull over the vehicle immediately!”

So we pulled over the vehicle immediately and he pulled up behind us.

He comes out of the car waving a flashlight around with one hand and adjusting his trousers with the other.  He stumbled over to the driver’s side door.  So my friend Rebecca rolls down the window.  As she does this, the cop flashed his light directly into her eyes and started barking at us.

Raquel fought with the cop outside against my advisement.  This was going downhill and I knew it.  That’s when the paranoia started to set in.  “Was I going to jail?”  I was so scared that I my hand was shaking.  So I looked at the pile of weed we had, I looked at Sai, I looked at the weed, then I looked at Sai and said instincitively, “we gotta eat this.”

Sai’s eyes went wide with hesitation, and I knew I wasn’t going to convince him to take this dive with me.  So… bottoms up.

And chewing on the weed felt like putting a clump of lawn grass in my mouth.  My gums were dry and I couldn’t swallow it all.

I looked like a Chipmunk with my cheeks filled with the stuff.  And stupid college me didn’t know that destruction of evidence was a felony, but he did know that it would be bad to be caught doing this.  Desperate to swallow it all, I drank down the remaining water of a bottle that we were using for ash disposal.  And this made it manageable, but I still had a full mouth.

So when the cop came to my side, I knew that I couldn’t open my mouth no matter what.

And I don’t know if it was the cop’s lack of due diligence, his benevolence, or my good luck, but he started by asking me my name.  And I kept my mouth shut.  He continued with more questions that I can’t remember, and I didn’t answer a thing.  Mostly because my mouth was full and I didn’t want him to know why.  So he said “using your right of silence, eh?” and I just nodded my head.

He told me to put my hands on the back of the car and Rebecca was there.  She looked at me and asked if I was ok.  And I couldn’t answer obviously.  Then she said “did you eat it?”  And I opened my eyes wide as in “be quiet!”  And she started laughing, so I lightly shoved her with the side of my leg to try to get her to stop.

In the end, the cop let us off with a warning and drove off.

But the thing that this taught me was that prevention is better than correction.

If I had been thinking of how not to get into this situation in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to risk everything just to stay out of trouble.  It’s much easier to under prepare than over prepare, so I have since been cautious about getting things right before setting the wheels in motion.

This is why I make sure that all the data is totally accurate and bulletproof, cause you never know when it’s going to be challenged.  In trying to maximize risk reward, I try to think: “what’s the worst likely outcome, and how will we thrive if it happens?”

Cause life has a way of testing you.

And you have to be ready.