I was reading Wayne Green's story of hitch-hiking and it brought to memory one of my two favorite hitching stories:
I became a ham just after the no-code tech was introduced. I quickly upgraded to General (when I only knew the code to about 10WPM) so I could have RTTY and AMTOR fun on HF...
Back in '92 or so, I had an old navy blue Oldsmobile '98. It was a diesel converted to a gas engine, which caused me no end of trouble with the smog nazi's in California. I guess the former owner, my old landlord who traded it to me for a 1978 Towne Landau Thunderbird I had, knew someone in the smog business who was able to sign off that car. I took it to a regular shop who flunked me, refered me to the "smog referee" station, and I had to return 5 times to the referee as they kept changing their mind about what things they wanted to force me to do to the car: install new catalytic converters, endless changes to vacuum hoses. The problem was they couldn't make up their mind as to what requirements to put on me, because the only marker on the engine was a code "XC" that they couldn't figure out which set of diagrams in their books should be used for it...
Anyhow, the car was very similar to the cruisers the police use, and I had the car all tricked out for amateur radio with 2 CB's radios, VHF/UHF (probably Alinco), shortwave with a Kenwood TS-850SAT all band HF, (yeah, too big to use as a mobile in any smaller car), a sanyo MBC-550 computer keyboard that looked like it was plugged into the car, 6 antennas on the outside, and an old black 4 line office rotary dial telephone, you know the kind with the jeweled buttons and red hold button?
The keyboard and the phone were just for show, but once got me out of a ticket in Illinois. A trooper pulled me over for going 65+ on a cross country trip, and when he came up to the car and looked inside and saw all the stuff, he asked about the phone "Does that work?" Without missing a beat, I picked up the received, listened for a second and then handed it to him "Uh yes, it's your sargeant on the line...." He went back to his car, brought back a warning ticket, told me to please exit his state at the earliest possible opportunity....
Anyhow, one time I picked up a hitchhiker who needed a short 10 minute ride. The fellow's eyes got so wide at all the stuff, he kept asking me what I did for a living. Or rather he kept trying to guess what I did for a living.... I guess the antennas helped, along with the dark color, to make people think it was a cop car, even though the paint was fading and peeling on the roof! Anyhow first he thought I worked for NASA or something, then he figured I must be a cop, then the CIA, and finally he started trying to find out if I was a narc (or a "Narcotics Policeman" as George Carlin likes to call them, because it sounds like you might have a chance "Good luck!")..... I just smiled and nodded at each of his guesses. When he got out of the car, just before he closed the door, I motioned to all the stuff, and said "You see all this stuff? The radios are real, but the keyboard, the phone, the other accessories, they are there mainly to give paranoid people like you something to be afraid of...." I then drove off leaving him to collect his astonished jaw from where it had dropped on the ground.....