A Cop Just Stopped By

So this cop just appeared at our door. He wanted to know who was sitting in the passenger seat of my car an hour and a half ago, at the Arbys on Patton and Florida. We called A's boyfriend J to the door, since he was the culprit. Turns out that he flipped off the Arbys, which he has a grudge against, and the cop, who was sitting inside the Arbys at the time thought that HE was being flipped off, so he spent the last hour and a half running my tags and tracking us down.

Don't Asheville cops have anything better to do? Is there no crime in this city? I mean, since when did flipping off a fast food joint become a crime? I grant you that it was a tacky and somewhat unpleasant thing to do (please note that I don't endorse this use of the middle finger in most circumstances) but criminal? Worthy of police notice? Weird and unsettling and even more so because the officer had some apparent trouble believing that in actual fact, none of the people in the car, my daughter, my son & my daughter's boyfriend, even saw him. How paranoid do you have to be to be sitting in a fast food restaurant, see someone in a passing car flip off the restaurant, and assume that you're the target? And just what, exactly, would he have done if J had been flipping him off? Is flipping off a cop against the law? And is any of it worth what it no doubt cost for this officer to use police resources to track down the flipper off?

More or less cross posted from the Hangover Journals.