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ROBBED! ROBBED! WE’VE BEEN ROBBED! THE CARS HAVE BEEN BROKEN INTO! PRAY FOR MERCY, THIEVES, FOR THE ICY HAND OF JUSTICE WILL SOON BE UPON YOU and by that I mean I am filing a very tersely worded report with plantation security.
Actually, I should back up a bit here. By “broken into” I mean “We left the doors unlocked like we just arrived on Earth from Planet Cleaver,” and by “robbed,” I mean “The only substantial thing missing was my wife’s old iPod from 1923 that had an unreadable screen, worked only when plugged into a power source and was filled basically with Indigo Girls music and medical podcasts.” Police are urged to keep an eye out for hooligans who are suddenly in touch with their emotions and have developed a sudden aptitude for rash treatment. Indeed, like a not-insignificant number of folks around here, we awoke one recent morning to find some items strewn about in our cars. This, however, was done in some sort of haste, as we live in one of those pitch-black areas of the island you can’t navigate after nightfall without being Batman, and — not to invite further visitation — but the thieves fully left the shimmering briefcase of gold bars I keep in the spare-tire well.
When you are robbed — even of objects so elderly that basically it’s less like being robbed and more like being saved a trip to Electronics Recycling Day — there are things you do as part of your initial, emotional response, such as vow to remain awake all night keeping a midnight vigil with an automatic paintball gun, or — and this is the one I went with — begin daydreaming up increasingly convoluted Rube Goldberg-style contraptions to trap the offenders, something with a tripwire that would trigger a bowling ball that would roll down a ramp, hitting a button that would open a trapdoor into a small chamber filled with five feet of pluff mud, three grumpy alligators and the cast of “Glee,” fill the chamber with wolf spiders, condensed milk and those brown slug lizard things we have around here that I hate, then slam the trap door shut for three days until someone came looking for the perpetrators. Frankly I’d be all about this idea, except I’m having trouble getting the POA to give me a spider permit.
So instead, I do what everyone does: Double-check their stupid locks three times a night, bristle reflexively every time a squirrel makes an unexpected sound outside, read the papers hoping for a story about the police discovering a warehouse in Yemasee filled with thousands upon thousands of dollars of nicked goods and one broken Indigo Girls-filled iPod, or hope that, one night, as dictated by karma, the thieves stumble through the dark, directly into an alligator.
