I'm Drunk?

Here's another episode of "look at how Carin and Steve spend their free time." For some odd reason we couldn't sleep, so we found an old rerun of Cops. Ooo! More crackheads getting halled off to jail! Fun! But in this case, they caught someone who was driving drunk. They started to do the field sobriety test, and were doing the part where they make the person stand on one foot and count to 30. I thought to myself, "Can I do that?" Apparently, I can't. Steve and I both tried it, and although Steve did much, much better than me, there was a lot of arm-extending and hopping.

Because I'm a big loser, I looked up the parts of a field sobriety test. Here was the part we were having trouble with.

In the One-Leg Stand test, the suspect is instructed to stand with one foot approximately six inches off the ground and count aloud by thousands (One thousand-one, one thousand-two, etc.) until told to put the foot down. The officer times the subject for 30 seconds. The officer looks for four indicators of impairment, including swaying while balancing, using arms to balance, hopping to maintain balance, and putting the foot down. NHTSA research indicates that 83 percent of individuals who exhibit two or more such indicators in the performance of the test will have a BAC of 0.08 or greater (Stuster and Burns, 1998).

Uh-oh. We're drunk and didn't even have any booze! No fair! I think Trixie must have thought we were pretty weird, swaying, counting, hopping, putting our foot up and down, up and down.

All I can say is it's a good thing there's something else other than apparent drunkenness standing in the way of me driving a car.