This weekend I was listening to a friend and co-worker, Melissa Osborn, tell me about a crazy experience she had on Friday night. I just had to post it for other Springfieldians to know because, I too, would have apparently handled this situation wrong according to the Springfield Police Department.
So, Mel has been back in Springfield for just a few months since she moved back from Austin, TX, after completing culinary school. She took the opportunity on Friday to check out Lindberg’s on Commercial Street for the first time and enjoy some local music. After the show, she walked out to her car when to her surprise she finds it adorned with FIVE large street signs: STOP, NO PARKING, YIELD and a couple others.
She stopped and stared in disbelief and after a funny personal thought of “okay, universe….I see the signs”, she began taking them all off of her car and instinctively put them in her trunk to return them to the city.
After work on Saturday, she notified the police department of the situation and they sent an officer out to pick them up and note the incident. To her surprise, instead of thanking her for returning them or asking if her car was damaged or even if she was in any danger, he treated her suspiciously as if this professional, 31-year old woman had the time or the notion to take five street signs from the city.
Feeling somewhat offended, she told the officer she really didn’t know what to do the night she found them on her car and asked him what she SHOULD have done in this situation.
His response, “Leave them in the street.”
So, here’s to you Mr. Springfield Policeman for your remarkable ability to look out for public safety! Sure, let’s just leave five large street signs in the street so someone can trip over them, slice their car tire on them and have a blowout or better yet, be stolen AGAIN to hang on some teenager’s bedroom wall at the expense of the taxpayers.
Come on, you can do better than that.
