41 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
41 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
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Subject: Drivers and Dummies
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Excerpted from "It Takes Special Training to Tell They
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Aren't Federal Bureaucrats" in _The Wall Street Journal_,
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Wednesday, 19 July 1989
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You probably suspected it all along, but here's
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confirmation: A lot of dummies commute to the nation's
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capital.
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Because of crawling rush-hour traffic around Washington,
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commuters from Virginia often are driven to use
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faster-moving car-pool lanes on their state's highways. But
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not all adhere to the three-person-per-vehicle minimum for
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the lanes. And some scofflaws try to avoid detection by
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hauling make-believe passengers: mannequins, blow-up dolls,
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and dummies.
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...
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When [Officer Angela Logan] pulled the driver [of a
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suspicious car] over, he approached the officer's car,
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trying, unsuccessfully, to prevent her from trekking to
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his. In the back seat, she found two mannequin heads, one
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without a body. She then summoned two other troopers to the
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scene so they could ``witness that it in fact happened.''
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...
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Since dummies can be used as evidence, drivers who are
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hauled into court find it hard to beat the rap. One tried
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to argue that his wife, being an artist, used the mannequins
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for her work. The judge didn't buy it.
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Some troopers are getting keener at detection. ``We have
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some people who have been doing this for some time,''
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Sgt. Redden [of the Virginia State Police] says of his
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colleagues. ``They'll take some dummies aside and look them
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eyeball-to-eyeball.''
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--
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