My first moving violation

I managed to go more than 10 years of licensed driving without ever getting a ticket for anything – or even getting pulled over for anything. Sadly, that all came to a screeching halt a few weeks ago when I learned an expensive lesson about the speed limit in school zones in South Dakota. I was driving under the assumption that the limit was 25 for school zones, like it is in Iowa. Apparently, despite the lack of a posted speed limit sign anywhere in the vicinity, I was supposed to know that the speed limit is 15 in South Dakota schoool zones. But seriously, when was the last time you actually saw anyone going 15 mph just because there's a high school three blocks away?

So, I got clocked doing 34 mph, which makes sense since I always try to drive exactly 9 mph over the speed limit with the assumption that anything less than 10 mph over is not worth the cops' time because they won't be able to slap you with a big enough fine. That assumption probably would have held true, except I was actually going 19 mph over the ridiculously low 15-mph speed limit.

I've heard through the pop culture grapevine that it's possible for women to get out of speeding tickets if you play dumb and act kind of overly polite/flirty/ditzy. I tried, but I guess I'm not very good at playing that game, since I still ended up with a $100 ticket.

But now, the worst part is I just set the ticket on the top of my pile of bills to pay by the end of the month. So I picked it up to mail in the payment today, and I realized that they were supposed to have it by Nov. 22, or else they're going to issue a warrant for my arrest. Damnit, that's what I get for not reading the fine print. So I'm sending in the money today, and I'm hoping that when they get it, they'll cancel the warrant, even though the ticket doesn't say that anywhere and doesn't give me any kind of number to call to find out. All I know is that I'll be really upset – and actually kind of frightened – if I have to spend time in the slammer.