“Please do not attempt this,” they wrote on Facebook. “Get your vehicle inspected according to the law at an official inspection station.”
Driver tried to fake out the law with a carton of Camels. He got burned, police say
There’s thinking outside the box ... and then there’s this guy.
A police officer in Plaistow, New Hampshire thought he saw something a little odd in the window of a car tooling around town on Thursday afternoon, the Union-Leader in Manchester reported.
When officer Edward Barrasso III pulled the car over for a closer look, he found the driver had indulged in some creative DIY.
Using rather crude artwork he had turned a carton of Camel cigarettes into a fake vehicle inspection sticker, the newspaper reported.
The police posted a photo of the fake sticker on their Facebook page.
The date “09-19” was drawn in big blue lettering. A dark pink — pink? — border was crudely colored in.
The driver hadn’t even bothered to cover up the onion domes and turrets of the Turkish town shown on the side of the Camel carton.
And we’re pretty sure New Hampshire has pine, not palm, trees.
“Although it is creative, it is definitely not legal,” the police department wrote in its Facebook post. “The driver had an actual box of Camel cigarettes in the window trying to imitate an official state inspection sticker. The driver was issued a traffic citation for the offense.”
Just FYI, this is what a real New Hampshire sticker looks like., according to a 2017 press release from the state’s Division of Motor Vehicles.
“The driver seemed to take a page out of the book of another New Hampshire driver who was cited in 2017 for using a cheese wrapper and parts of a Hannaford circular in place of inspection and registration stickers,” wrote Patch news website.
That driver used a wrapper for “cracked pepper sharp” cheese, and part of an ad that read “these prices hold until July 8,” Patch reported two years ago.
“We can’t even file this under the ‘A for effort’ category,” the police in Alexandria, New Hampshire wrote on Facebook about that art project.
The Plaistow constables clearly got a chuckle out of the cigarette carton, but were serious nonetheless with their warning.
This story was originally published February 15, 2019 at 3:45 PM with the headline "Driver tried to fake out the law with a carton of Camels. He got burned, police say."