If you catch the officer in a good mood and can make him/her smile/laugh with you about wife/kid/whatever, you may indeed skate on the speeding.
But its still not worth it.
When my daughter was in college, at University of California at Santa Barbara, she got t-boned in an intersection by a driver who ran a red light. She got a bad mTBI concussion and it bruised the brain so hospital she was taken to gave her drugs to sedate her and paralyze her, so they have to put her on a respirator etc. to keep her alive while the swelling went down.
I say all this in retrospect, because at the time we had no idea if she would survive it without brain damage or worse.
We lived in San Jose, CA, quite a way north of Santa Barbara. And my wife wouldn't fly (my first choice, SJ Int to SB County would have been 20 minutes or so) so we had to drive.
She told me she'd divorce me if I didn't drive faster, so I told her she'd never forgive me if I did and lost control and/or had an accident and we didn't get there until the next day. So she shut up. Driving fast was not going to save our daughter's life, and if an hour not saved by speeding caused us to miss seeing her expire, such are small blessings not counted so.
Halfway to SB, a pickup truck passed us doing over 100 mph. About 5 minutes later we came upon the pickup truck, upside down, wheels spinning, engine running, doors still closed. I started to brake (hey, I've a good samaritan) and my wife told me she would divorce me and then kill me if I stopped.
I understood. This woman was frantic because her "baby girl" was in a hospital bed, paralyzed, unconscious, on a respirator, being fed through a needle in her arm. And someone else had already stopped, and it was pre-cellphone unless you had $6,000 to spend on the cellphone's ancestor so I couldn't call 911. I slowed down and asked the man who had stopped if anyone had taken the message to the nearest phone, and he told me yes, and come back, and ambulance and fire department and cops were on the way.
So we arrived SB Hospital at around 9pm, and even out of visiting hours, they took us in, and we took turns sitting watch, while the other ate and slept and showered. This went on for 4 days.
Finally they removed the sedation and her eyes opened, but she was still paralysed artifically. The terror in her eyes brought tears streaming down my face, so I took my Day Timer out of my suit pocket and wrote "You can't move they gave you a drug to paralyze you to protect your brain" and the terror look diminished. So I wrote "You will be ok, they will take you off the respirator and all in 24 hours" and the terror look went away.
So Marna (my daughter), blinking eyelids for yes, no, I don't know, and my wife and I carried on a paper communication until they set her free. And still she couldn't go home. But she was ok and stayed that way.
This is a long story. Sorry. But the point is, if we had gone really fast and got killed like the guy(s) in the pickup truck probably did, what would have happened to Marna?
Living the Gypsy Life
