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About ten years back, I was attending graduate school in a large Midwestern city. An ex-girlfriend of mine -- a law student -- lived about a block from my house, and since we had remained on good terms after the breakup, we frequently hung out together. One afternoon, Meg called me up and asked if I wanted to wander down the street to get coffee. I had been looking for an excuse to take a break from the paper I was writing, so I agreed to meet her. As it turned out, she needed to get out of the house because a car alarm was going off outside her apartment, and she couldn’t concentrate. Exams were coming up, and she was pretty stressed out.
As I walked down the street toward the coffee shop, I passed by the offending vehicle. It was one of those alarms without an automatic shut-off, and it had probably been howling and blinking for at least 45 minutes by the time I saw it. I have a thing about car alarms; I detest them. Of course, I’ve never owned anything worth protecting, but still…I don’t enjoy car alarms.
I met Meg outside her apartment and walked to the coffee shop, where we were protected from the noise and were able to catch up and commiserate about all the work we were putting off. After a couple of hours, we decided it was time to head home. As we approached her apartment, the familiar sound of the alarm greeted us. Meg was really agitated. It was still mid-afternoon, so the city’s noise ordinances were useless. In any event, the police were unlikely to care about something so apparently trivial as a renegade car alarm. So we were on our own.
We stood for a few minutes in front of her apartment building. Meg smoked another cigarette and complained to several other neighbors who had congregated on the sidewalk. No one seemed to have any good ideas about how to deal with the problem, until Meg abruptly turned and walked into her building. “Hold on a minute,” she called back.
Two minutes later, she reappeared with a giant white bag of garbage, which she quickly ripped open and dumped onto the hood of the car. Her neighbors, impressed by the gesture, joined her. Within about ten minutes, five bags of garbage had been emptied. Someone else appeared with a carton of cottage cheese and a bottle of maple syrup from his fridge. After the damage was done, everyone left quickly.
When I spoke with Meg a couple of days later, she told me that on the evening after the community garbage dump, she had overheard a woman in her apartment building complaining to a friend about her car, which had been vandalized. Apparently, someone had poured their garbage all over it.
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