This week I needed to renew my car insurance which seems to be getting ever more expensive. I did some grumbling and some humming and hawing before deciding what to actually pay for. I handed over my plastic “folder” of insurance documents and the agent started going through it.
After a little while, she said, “oh you’ve forgotten to put this on” as she showed me the insurance sticker. Apparently, for the entire past year, I’d been driving with an outdated insurance sticker. The fact that I was never pulled over for this is a little mind-boggling as I spent about two hours on the road most days.
It reminded me of an incident that occurred years ago after we first moved to Canada. I can’t quite remember the exact details, but I hadn’t been driving for that long; I either still had an “L” or an “N.” I was driving in Williams Lake in front of what was then Columneetza with my mom in the passenger seat when a police car pulled up behind me. He turned on his lights.
Now there’s some important background information that I should clear up here. In the Netherlands, where my parents lived for most of their life, and where I grew up, if the police want to pull you over, they’ll pass you and then flash a “stop” sign in their rear window.
With this in mind, when the officer turned on his lights, my mom told me to keep driving.
So there we were in Williams Lake, going through a school zone at a crawling pace with a police car flashing his lights behind us in what is possibly the slowest car chase ever on record. Before long he also turned on his siren. My mom insisted I kept driving but before long I decided that it would probably be best to pull over.
I was a little confused why I was being pulled over in the first place since I definitely hadn’t been speeding and didn’t blow any stops signs. I think the officer was probably even more confused at who would try to get away from the police in a school zone while going approximately 25 km/h.
Sufficient to say after having forgotten it once myself, I made sure I put the sticker on right away this time around.
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