I am driving home in a surprisingly good mood after the dinner event. But I’m thinking the good mood is because of the escape versus the actual time in jail. I mean dinner. The reason I do not like these dinner party things is because my social skill are nil and I end up feeling worthless, hopeless, and stupid after such nights. That I am sentenced to wherever my lack of volume control in listening and speaking combined with my ill tuned social makes takes me. As I pull up to the stop light at fourth ring road there is a long line of buses in my lane. I do something I’ve very seldom do and take the side road cut in which leads to the … well … side road. The side road has the option of going straight or right, I am planning on going straight. I am about the fifth car in line at the red light, which has been red for a while. At car three is a policeman doing alcohol breath tests. He walks to the fourth car. The light should turn green I’m thinking. Fourth car’s driver passes, he starts to walk to my car. I am waiting on he green which doesn't come until after I roll down my window. He asks me to blow into a brown, rectangular brick looking device. About the size of a kindle but as thick as a laptop. I blow. He raises is voice and yells something in Chinese. I figure it means he wants my license, which I take out of my wallet which he continues to bark instructions which I don’t understand. My chinese companion is on her cell phone and she hangs up and says “ut oh”. He asks for the other piece of my license which i don’t carry – i only carry the picture piece. He’s not thrilled that I don’t have it. He has me get into the back seat and he drives my car under the underpass where a police car is waiting. I am calm. I am thinking this is not good.

When we get to the police car, there are two other officers there and I stand in the cold feeling very sober. Truth be told I did not have a lot to drink. 1.5 bears, 20oz or so, over two hours at the dinner party. And I did not have anything to drink the last 45 minutes. But the law here is zero drinking and the blood alcohol failure level is 0.3. A new police officer attaches a breather tube to the brown brick as I try to remember the techniques to lower your result when tested. I can’t remember any so I blow, but soft, and the officer is not happy. Seems I need to blow harder and longer but I really have no specific idea what the want, although I get the general drift. The put another tube in another brick and I blow and the reading is 21. Fail number is 20. I’m not sure how the 20 maps to 0.3, but I think it means I was something like 0.32. In any case, it is not good enough as they pretty much already made up their mind and I felt like I was fulfilling some type of quota.  Not having the second part of my license was a problem, to the point that they drove me home, into the basement of the 30 story apartment building I live in. The bonus side effect was I did not have to find anyone to pick me up and drive my car home. I got the second part of my license and they commenced the paper work. I signed and dated my name multiple times, never knowing whether to print it or handwrite it or what the heck I was signing. The three officers then drove off, leaving my car but taking my license.

At the end of the day it was clear, no license for three months. Need to take additional driver’s training because I ran out of points in large part because of this (six points) but also because I let someone who had more traffic violations than me use my points in lieu of hers. I tell this story to a friend and he suggests I should have tried various things to prevent it and then once caught that I should now try various things to get out of it. Most of them involve lying and prying and generally being an ass. I tell him I broke the law and I will do the punishment. That even though its doesn’t seem so fair in this case, I knew the law when I got in the car. And after all, it’s not like I’m an innocent. And he says that if I could have avoided getting caught in the first place – taking a different route, handing him my california license – that I would have. And it’s true, I would have. I would have settled for that damn light just to turn green.