Close Encounters of the "cop" kind...

Sorry, Mr. Spielberg, but I couldn't just resist adapting the name of your masterpiece for the title of this post. :-P This is an anecdote of a very funny incident (in hindsight, of course :-P), one which scared the hell out of me (as would it do to any tourist in any foreign country) and something that's not about to happen to many people in their very first week as a student with a visa....

This is an incident which happened just yesterday to my room-mate, whom I'll refer to as Mr. R. Now, we'd come on campus to get some formalities done, like getting his 49er ID card, and we wanted to fill some cash into it (for those of you who don't know how this works, this is how it is: our student ID card can be used an a debit card anywhere on the UNCC campus, once you fill it up with some money, and whenever you swipe it on campus, at say, a vending machine or when you use it to buy food at the many cafeterias on campus, the proper amount gets deducted from your balance). So, Mr. R, feeling very enthusiastic about this system, wanted to fill some cash into his card, and so we proceeded to the ID card office, where he gave a $50 bill to the cashier. The lady at the counter checked it & became suspicious about the bill. Thinking that it might be a fake, she asked us to wait, while she called the cops. As you might be knowing, the university campuses here in the US are very large in size (ours here at UNCC is around a 1000 acres), so most universities have their own police force on campus, which is always on hand. Now, at the end, fortunately the cops verified the bill in question, and declared it to be genuine. So, having put me & Mr. R through a lot of tensed moments and scared us both out of our wits, the staff almost tripped over each other to apologise to us, and gave us a $10 Gift Card for all our trouble :-P

But, all is well that ends well, as they say, and we got a gift card for free, so I'd say my close encounter of the "cop" kind wasn't so unproductive after all :-P.....so, keep checking this blog for more of my misadventures, as & when they happen....