I need help from the SF set out there reading this journal. I need a copy of the Star Wars/COPS takeoff called TROOPS. If anyone has a copy of this can I pleeease get a copy on video? And if no one has a copy, will someone who will be attending Worldcon pleeease look for it there for me? I will pay costs, shipping, etc.

Last night was slow--first night back on nightwatch, so around 2am everyone was fighting the sleepies. (We do two weeks day shift, then two weeks night shift. Most everyone detests dayshift and looks forward to nightshift coming back around.) I parked next to a State Trooper for a while in a gas station parking lot, both of us watching the service road and hoping that we'd find a drunk driver coming out of the town's only strip joint. But last night seemed to be one of those nights where nobody was doing anything wrong. No drunks. No speeders. Everyone had working headlights and taillights. As the night progressed, slowly inching its way toward shift change, there'd be occasional bursts of static on the radio--signs that someone had keyed up their radio, just to make sure it was still working. A radio that stays silent too long makes a cop nervous--always that fear that our lifeline might be, for some unforseen reason, non-functioning, and then we'd be out alone in the muggy heat with no way to call for backup should something finally happen.

So we sat in our cars, side by side, each of us with one window rolled down for conversation, and the air conditioner up to counter the choking humidity. The radio would crackle uselessly, cutting through long bouts of air silence. Still nothing for me, but then the trooper got a call about someone lying in the road somewhere, and he rushed off in that "thank god I can finally DO something now" burst of acceleration. I remained behind, jealous.

Then finally a call, and though it's not in my zone, I happen to be closer to it than the guy whose zone it is. Nothing more than some underage kids trying to buy beer who wouldn't leave the EZ serve, and after my corporal and I had reamed the kids out for being out after curfew and trying to buy beer (and also threatened the over-17s in the crowd with being charged with Contributing) we finally sent them on their way with the admonition that if we saw them on the street again that night someone was going to jail.

3:30am, and the radio goes back to being silent, so the corporal and I stay in the parking lot and shoot the shit for a while. After a few minutes the deputy whose zone we're in pulls up and joins in the conversation, "God Damn, I'm falling asleep!" being the prevailing opening line for conversations on this night. "This job is 99% boredom," the corporal said at one point, "and the other 1% sheer terror." And we all nodded sagely, and wished for just a touch of that 1% at that point.