School Officials in Our (Hot) Pocket

This just in from the news desk, heiress to the billion-dollar Hot Pockets fortune, Michelle Janavs, has just been sentenced to five months in jail for attempting to get her two daughters into college by paying now infamous William “Rick” Singer, the Newport Beach “college admissions consultant,” over three hundred thousand dollars in cash and frozen food.

Janavs paid Singer one hundred thousand dollars to facilitate the bribing of a high school testing official and two hundred thousand dollars to buy a USC administrator’s approval of a bogus sports admission.

Police were already investigating Singer and his phony foundation, but may not have found out about his dealings with Janavs, had it not been for the eighteen-wheeler of Hot Pockets that backed up to his office one afternoon. Apparently, he had requested a portion of his illegal compensation in the form of the delicious microwavable frozen snack food.

Initially, authorities feared the worst when the surveillance teams reporting Singer buying twenty full-size chest freezers over the course of week. Thankfully, he had not graduated to mass murder and body storage, and the police simultaneously breathed a sigh of relief and had a new lead to follow when the Hot Pockets truck arrived.

The trail to the Janavs family’s huge front door was a short one. Conspicuously missing from the tests allegedly taken by the Janavs girls were the tell-tale ever-present greasy fingerprints and marinara stains. And authorities were immediately suspicious about the USC admission under the guise of being an elite beach volleyball player, since both daughters, having been raised from a babies on nothing but Hot Pockets and ranch dipping sauce, each weigh close to seven hundred pounds.

Facing five months in jail, Michelle Janavs’ legal team has worked out a special arrangement with the California Institution for Women and Day Spa in Corona, California, where she will be housed. Michelle’s team of personal physicians submitted a three-thousand-page document to the courts detailing her fragile health condition.

Essentially, due to a lifetime of eating nothing but Hot Pockets, she could die almost instantly if she consumes anything else, other than diet soda, of course. “We need to maintain her saturated fat and sodium levels at their normal six thousand percent of the recommended daily value,” said her lead doctor, “or the consequences could be dire. Hot Pockets, and Hot Pockets alone are the best way to do that.”

“Prior to arriving here in Corona, Mrs. Janavs will have a minimum of four hundred sixty-five boxes of Hot Pockets delivered for her personal consumption, plus any she plans to trade for cigarettes and shivs,” CIWDS warden Janet Stevens told us. “We are having to add a second walk-in freezer here to accommodate her special dietary restrictions.”

“We’re excited about her coming here,” an anonymous guard at the prison shared with us. “Given her history, we figured she’d be up for bribing us, which she totally was. She’s bringing in an additional four full trucks worth to take care of all the guards’ families. It’s going to be amazing. We love Hot Pockets!”

Happily, not all clouds have a silver lining. Some are lined with a crispy crust and seven thousand-degree mozzarella cheese.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2020 Marc Schmatjen

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Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

Something Stinks at the DMV

We have had a major shift in our public services. The script has been flipped, as the cool kids say. The Department of Motor Vehicles used to be the gold standard for government inefficiency, but not so anymore. Based on a few news items that caught my attention recently and my own personal DMV experience this week, I would have to conclude that the DMV is greased lightning compared to our justice system.

Don’t get me wrong. The DMV still sucks immensely. They’re just doing it much quicker now. I had a DMV appointment at 8:30 A.M. on Monday to get new license plates. I walked out at 8:32 A.M. with my new plates. The thing that took the longest was having to walk all the way around the line of eighty-five people without appointments to get out the door. Moral: Don’t go to the DMV without an appointment. And also, based on a recent news story, if you have an appointment to get a commercial drivers license, but can’t pass the test, you should bring bribe money. Apparently, it speeds the process along.

Yes, the headline reads: Two California DMV managers investigated in bribery scheme.

For the second time in just over a year, the California Department of Motor Vehicles is dealing with a federal investigation for bribery.

According to court documents obtained by KCRA 3 Investigates, Kari Scattaglia and Lisa Terraciano, both managers at the DMV in the Los Angeles area, accepted bribes to allow drivers to get commercial drivers licenses that allow people to drive semi trucks, tour buses and other large commercial vehicles.

You read that correctly. People who had no business doing so were driving tour busses and semi trucks, thanks to the California DMV.

The complaint… states that the two managers had been taking money to give passing grades and commercial licenses since 2013.

Over the last year, federal agents set up sting operations at least six times where they asked the two managers to change failing grades and grant Class C licenses.

So, here’s my problem with this. It’s not that two government employees thought they could use their positions of power to cheat and steal. That’s like breathing for a lot of government employees. Sad, but not shocking. My problem is with the federal agents who felt the need to set up six separate sting operations over an entire year, and apparently have known about these two idiots for FIVE years.

Hey, federal agents, how about just one single sting operation and remove them from their jobs right away, huh? Throw them in jail or don’t, but get them out of the DMV so Bad Choices Bob, the Unsafe Truck Driver, isn’t hurtling his massive rig down the highway near my family while he smokes crank and continues not knowing what the minimum safe following distance should be for an 80,000-pound Peterbilt with forged maintenance records.

And these two ladies weren’t the only DMV employees in on this lucrative off-books retirement plan. There have been investigations in Sacramento and San Joaquin County as well, both spanning multiple years!

Ultimately, the DMV admitted that more than 600 illegal commercial licenses were issued in the Northern California scheme. The office would not reveal how many more commercial licenses were allegedly issued by the two Los Angeles-area managers, claiming that it was an open investigation.

Six hundred truck drivers on the road in Northern California, and an untold number in Southern California, all of whom had no business driving a Miata, let alone a semi or a tour bus. That actually explains a lot about the state of things out on the highways these days, but it does not explain this: How, in this situation, are the good guys as slow as the DMV, and the DMV is finally efficient, handing out bogus licenses as fast as McDonald’s hands out heart disease.

I mean, maybe the federal investigators didn’t have an appointment and had to wait in that line. Maybe that’s why it took five years to stop these people. Who knows?

The other news item that caught my attention was from all the way over in Kansas City, Missouri, but ties in perfectly in my mind with the California DMV story. The headline reads: Suspect's farting shuts down interrogation.

A police interrogation of a Kansas City man charged with drug and gun offenses ended prematurely when an investigator was driven from the room by the suspect's excessive flatulence.

A detective reported that when asked for his address, 24-year-old Sean Sykes Jr. "leaned to one side of his chair and released a loud fart before answering."

The Kansas City Star reports that Sykes "continued to be flatulent" and the detective was forced to quickly end the interview.

How could these two stories be related, you ask? Simple. If our federal justice system is really concerned with justice, those bribe-taking California DMV employees will all be flown out to Kansas City and put in the same air-tight cell with Sean Sykes Jr.

Having Mr. Sykes transported on a plane to California just seems too risky for everyone involved.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2018 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!