If, Then

If you are driving home from school at ten on a Monday night and you round a bend just before the point where you merge from highway to highway and you notice that the car behind you is climbing up your tailpipe so you tap on your brakes three times in an effort to convey the universal sign for, "Kindly back up off my bum,"

And if you then see the car follow you from highway to highway and exit at your exit so you peer into your rearview mirror as you come to a stop sign at the bottom of a hill in order to identify the color of the car - cream, in the dark - so that you can monitor it and determine whether you will need to engage in evasive driving maneuvers,

And if you continue down a newly-opened road only to have the cream-colored car move into the left hand lane and somehow disappear at the same time that a yellow-white patrol car pulls up alongside you so you thank your lucky stars that you've been adhering to the speed limit on this particular stretch of residential blacktop even though the police car is speeding and soon outdistances you,

And if you turn onto the winding series of side streets that lead to your house and come face to face - or, perhaps, headlight to headlight - with another patrol car, the only one you've ever seen in your neighborhood, that turns when you turn, and turns when you turn again, and then turns just after you turn so that it drives parallel to you across a narrow wedge of park while you pull up to the curb directly on the property line between your house and the house next door, and then drives slowly along so you sit in the car until it has pulled away,

Then do you immediately conclude that some hooligans in a stolen patrol car have followed you home because you angered them with your too-slow curve-rounding?

Because I do.