An early morning phone call. Or, Why it might be inadvisable to flirt with policemen at three in the morning.

Dr Tabubil has finished with Obs and Gobs and is working the ER.

            She doesn't much like Saturday nights.  They live  up to all the chaotic, drunken reputations they've earned on daytime television dramas.  And at about 3 am, things start to get slightly surreal.
            Later, around 8 am, my telephone rings:

            "Hey Tabubilgirl."

            "Hey Dr Tabubil."

            "Talk about puppies to me for five minutes will you?  I need to hear something nice."

            "What happened?"

            She sighs. "So.  It's about three in the morning and I'm stitching up a girl who's been glassed by her own mother -"

            "Did you call child services?"

            I can hear her shrug  "She was over 18.  What was I supposed to do?  You should have seen what she did to her mother.  Anyway - I'm stitching up this girl and a cop comes in with a drunk in handcuffs that he needs to have sewn up where he fell into a mailbox. 

            And I'm really tired.  And the cop is really, really cute.  He's wearing leather gloves so I can't tell if he's wearing a wedding ring or not, but he smiles at me, this totally gorgeous smile - and have I mentioned that I'm really really tired?  And that I haven't eaten for about ten hours because it's been too busy for me to sit down long enough to even eat a biscuit?  So maybe my reasoning abilities aren't quite at their best, okay - so do you know what I do?

            I look at him, and I say in my very best throaty flirty voice:  Is that a taser in your pocket?"

            "Or are you just happy to see me?!?"  I snickered.

            "Oh my God, no!  I wasn’t that far gone.  But he looked at me and smiled again - this really long, slow, sexy smile, and stood just a little bit taller and said 'Why yes.  Yes it is.'

            And then I said - oh my god, I purred - and I think I even fluttered my eyelashes a bit - I said - 'You know.  There's something I've always wanted to know.  Is it true that when you policemen learn how to use tasers, you have to practice on each other?'

            And he smiled even wider and cocked his eyebrows at me and said 'And I always volunteer.'

And -BAM.  Just like that.  My crush was gone.  I mean, the policeman was nuts. So I turned back to my drunk and finished stitching up his head.  And then I went and found a biscuit."

            "Do you think maybe you could carry biscuits around the ward with you in your pocket?  You know, to stop you getting into emergency situations like that?"

            A sigh.  "Could you just talk to me about puppies for about five minutes,  before I go to bed?  And then I'm going to sleep and I'm not going to talk to another policeman for at least a month. And male cops shouldn't be allowed to wear gloves. It's all his fault. If he'd been married and I'd been able to see a wedding ring, this would never have happened in the first place."