I like the police, personally. It's their job to stand between me and anarchy, and I dislike even the thought of anarchy and would not do very well when caught up in the real thing. This makes me seemingly unusual for graduates of my alma mater--everyone always forgets the older students and only remembers the young, stupid ones--but I remember, if no one else does, that Ted Bundy hunted our campus at least once, and it was police who caught him. And on routine traffic stops two of the three times, at that.

The reason it is better to call a cop than handle it yourself is that a cop is an authority figure, and that has a tendency (unless you're dealing with stupid Greeners) to defuse the situation. Your neighbour who has no compunctions about hitting you for interfering with his beating up his wife will probably react differently to the cop.

Further, I don't really think that shouting matches can generally be resolved by skillful diplomacy. I think that, by the time it's elevated to shouting, most people have stopped listening anyway.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"