Friday, October 1, 2010

You have no idea who you're dealing with




















Lately at Toastmasters I’ve been working on the Humorously Speaking manual, so I’ve been looking for funny stories. Two weeks ago there was a good one in the Idaho Statesman. A man responded to a Craigslist ad for a laptop computer. First he was told to meet the seller at night in a gated neighborhood. Then the seller tried to redirect him nearby to a dark, abandoned parking lot.

At that point the buyer got suspicious that this looked like a setup for an armed robbery. He took out his cell phone, and called the Garden City police for help.

When he and the policeman drove over to the lot, two dark-clad men ran from the scene. Both men were handcuffed and arrested, because the buyer also was a law enforcement officer and was armed.

The buyer was Gary Raney, who is the Sheriff of Ada County. He runs a 600 man department. That includes the 1200-bed county jail, which is where both the seller and his accomplice wound up. They previously had advertised an iPad and robbed the buyer.

Once I read about an even dumber armed robber. He drove into a small town just after midnight and tried to holdup the first open business he saw, which was the local diner. One of the patrons calmly told him to please put that gun away, because you are completely outgunned. The diner was right next door to the county sheriff’s station, and a half dozen deputies had stopped there (as usual) after finishing their shifts.

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