Long ago and far, far away, I was married and my husband was a sergeant in the local police department. He is a good writer and having been a policeman for many years, he knew how to complete a police report such that he never had to go to court. His reports were very specific and detailed and they could stand alone.
(For simplicity's sake, I shall refer to my husband as "Big T" because his name starts with a "T" and, well, he's a big guy -- and "Mr. T" is already taken.)
As a leader, Big T wanted to teach his team to write good reports. Therefore, he would make his officers give him their reports for review at the end of the shift. His pet peeve regarding his team's reports was that if the person of interest got away, the reports typically said, "The suspect fled." Big T would always then ask, "How did the suspect flee? Did he run away? Jump off a cliff? Was he picked up by someone in a car? Did a helicopter fly by and he climbed up a rope ladder?" He would make the writer re-do the report to describe the fleeing in detail.
After a certain amount of time had passed with inadequate improvement in this area, Big T lamented to me that he could not seem to get this one point through to his team and that he wished he knew how to take the word "fled" out of the system completely so they couldn't use it all.
As it turned out, the reports were typed into a computer program I knew quite well, and I taught him how to create an auto-complete for the word "fled." He chose to replace "fled" with "poopiehead." Sooooo, after that every time an officer wrote in his or her report that the suspect fled, what printed out was "the suspect poopiehead."
In general, typing was not the best skill these officers had in their arsenals, so reports tended to be typed with one or two fingers and eyes glued to the keyboard. No one looked at the computer screen, and no one proofread the report after printing it. Everyone simply took their completed/printed reports to my husband for review and approval.
Big T can keep a straight face better than anyone I've ever known. When he read a report that said, "the suspect poopiehead," he would act completely mystified and say, "The suspect poopiehead?! What? Poopiehead??" Naturally, the report-writer was stumped and Big T would say, "You'd better re-write that. It doesn't make any sense."
After "poopiehead" had been around for a while, I happened to ride along with Big T one night. After the shift, I parked myself in a chair just inside his office door with my book, planning to read until we could go home. I was distracted from my reading, however, when I overheard this conversation just outside the door:
Experienced officer: Whatever you do, don't ever say that anyone fled. Describe what happened. You can't ever use the word "fled"!
New officer: Why not? What am I supposed to say?
Experienced officer: Just say what happened in plain words because every time you type "fled," "poopiehead" prints out instead. It's crazy! No one knows what causes it; one day it just started printing out "poopiehead" and we can't make it stop. It's really embarrassing when the sergeant reviews your report and it says "poopiehead" in it. So don't ever say "fled"!!
LOL!!
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