On Friday, I was covering a story at Dallas police headquarters, where the governor of Bangkok had come to drive around a SWAT tactical robot.

He was also here to tour the dispatch and 911 centers and see equipment to take a look at how Thailand might improve security at embassies. The more photogenic situation, though, was him driving around a robot while Dallas police modeled a helmet.

As part of my theme for Friday, I was then called to a SWAT stand-off in Arlington.

A guy driving a semi-truck, you see, had rammed several cars leaving Ft. Worth and then crashed near Cooper Street.

Arlington police had told reporters media should gather at the QuikTrip on Cooper, a couple blocks south of the highway.

“Oh,” I thought to myself, “They have good breakfast pizza.”

I called my newsroom and explained I’d head that way.

“But wait!” I realized. “It’s not still breakfast time! By now, they’ve probably just got regular pizza, which is forgettable.”

I pulled in and saw a photographer from one of the TV stations. An officer was directing traffic (even with a large police presence, one guy pulled up and yelled that he needed to keep heading down Cooper. Needed!), and since we were the only two who had already arrived, he said he would look for a better place to set up his camera.

At that point, the media relations folk from Ft. Worth and Arlington police started walking over and we all got together, but we met in the lot of the 7-Eleven across the street (I’ve never bothered to try their food. Is that gas station-ist?).

As we watched, some folks who had been caught at a restaurant near the interchange were inching closer and closer. On top of the overpass, though, was a sniper. I feel like I wouldn’t be that anxious to get close to a sniper. The photographers were inching closer, too. I, meanwhile, was happy to hang back and tweet pictures.

The picture below is not a good picture of the sniper, but I declined to get any closer. I even texted an associate to see if it was okay to tweet a joke about people wandering up. He said it was, as long as no one was hurt.

Remarkably, no one was. The guy driving the truck had apparently hit five or six cars on the trip from Ft. Worth. He was booked after a stop at the hospital for observation.

In retrospect, though, that one-liner on twitter doesn’t seem as hilarious.

Also, no one was hurt when the governor of Bangkok drove the robot around.