Shortly after Stephanie left for pilates at 6:30 tonight, I heard a sound outside like someone had dropped a box of books on the sidewalk. My stomach sank—had a car tipped one of our scooters? I looked out the bedroom window and saw they were both upright.
So I scanned the street, curious for the source of the sound. Just below our apartment I noticed some broken glass beside a car parked in front of our building. And I saw a person on the street side reaching into the car. No way I thought, someone is breaking into a car in BROAD daylight? As rush hour traffic sails by?
Without thinking, I ran out the apartment and down the stairs, expecting him to be gone by the time I got outside. But no, he was still there, still reaching into the car from the rear passenger window. I stood at the entrance of our building watching him through the car, thinking he’d notice me and jet. His obliviousness led me to believe that this was indeed his car, and that he’d just locked his keys inside and was trying to find them. It did look like he was searching for some specific thing, rather than just grabbing anything that was visible.
Across the street at the hospital parking garage a man yelled at him, “Hey is that your car?” He ignored the question. After a bit, I walked up to the car on the sidewalk side and knocked on the window. He didn’t notice me. I knocked again and said, “Hey! Did you lose your keys or something?”
He looked up, completely unfazed and said “Oh yeah, this sucks, lost my keys, with all my stuff in the car, I’ve got to get it all out, until the locksmith comes…” and he went back to what he was doing. I saw him grab money and a CD player, definitely things I wouldn’t want to leave in a car with a busted window.
The guy across the street yelled at me, “Hey, is that his car?” I shrugged my shoulders and walked back into the building. On the way up the stairs, I thought to myself, why would anyone break into their own car before the locksmith arrived? Kind of defeats the whole purpose. So I figured I should call the police, just as a precaution. In the very least they could help the poor guy out.
So I googled for “sf police” and called them (the number is 415-553-0123 by the way—it’s now in my cellphone), waited through messages in 18 different languages telling me to hang up and dial 911 if this was an emergency. Meanwhile I was watching this guy from my window still root around in the car. The dispatcher came on, and I told her someone broke the window on a car and seemed to be rifling through what’s inside. He said he’s the owner, but you can never be too sure. I gave a description of the man, and even craned my head out the window to read the license plate off the car (they were out of state plates). I gave her my name and number, and she said they’d send someone over.
I figured before anyone showed up he’d be out of there. So I just waited at my window watching him dig through the car, which happened to be packed with a lot of camping and travel gear. He seemed to be loading some backpacks with things. I started to feel bad. This probably was his car, and now he’d have to hassle with the police—who I’d also inconvenienced.
After a few minutes, a police cruiser stopped suddenly in the lane between the guy and the car. One quick siren “whooop” got his attention. They had the windows open, pointing guns or flashlights out the window as the car came to a stop. They yelled, “Get your hands up! Put your hands on the car! Do you have any weapons!?” as they got out of the car.
At this point I felt really bad for the guy, who looked clearly startled. But instead of listening to the officers, he started backing away from them towards the sidewalk with the stuff he was carrying. BIG MISTAKE. They did not like that, and yelled, “Stop! Get down on the ground! Drop what’s in your hands!” and they rushed towards him, right beneath my window, and I felt the whole building shake as they collided with it. Ugh! Poor stupid guy, I thought.
At this point the action was out of my sight, beneath the bay window. I expected them to discover that the car was indeed his. I imagined the cops having to apologize for body slamming the guy. I saw one of the officers looking over the car when my phone rang—an unknown 415 number. I answered. It was the dispatcher! She told me the officers had arrived (uh, yeah) and asked if I was still in the area (uh, yeah) and whether I could go down talk to them (umm, really?).
I walked down the stairs and stood at the entrance of our building, staying out of sight of the guy. I waved at one of the officers. Eventually he came over and made the connection that I had called the police. He asked whether I’d be willing to make a statement for them. But first I had to know, “Was that his car?” He looked down and shook his head. “Nope.”
No way! I actually stopped a crime!!! What a crazy rush! I cannot believe it! How freaking cool is that? It pisses me off every time I see freshly broken bits of auto glass on the sidewalk, and I see it often enough to consider theft from cars epidemic in San Francisco. So I actually helped the police catch one of the perps! Hot damn!
So I ended up writing a page long detailed statement about what I heard, saw, and experienced. I bumped into our upstairs neighbors who happened to see him earlier scoping out cars on our block, so they wrote a statement too. Meanwhile some other cops took the guy off to jail. Thankfully I didn’t have to see him again. The police officers finally managed to get in touch with the car’s owner who came over and thanked me for saving their stuff.
Stephanie had come home in the middle of this startling scene, so we went out to dinner to celebrate and recount what had happened. On the way home, there were no cars parked in the spot where the car had been, just a swath of broken glass. Ah, city living. So we decided to take a photograph.
I’m not a big Star Wars buff or anything, but there’s a point in one of the movies, I’m not sure which, just after a planet had been destroyed when Obi-Wan senses a disturbance in “the force.” He says it felt as if millions of voices had suddenly cried out and then went silent.
I’m often reminded of that description when confronted with news reports about terrible natural disasters. 12,000 people killed in an earthquake in China. 100,000 killed after a cyclone passed through Burma. 225,000 killed in the Indian Ocean Tsunami.
Hath mother nature no respect for human life?
I don’t know what the planet’s current daily death rate is, but I imagine it’s pretty unfathomable by itself. But still, when so many people of all ages and walks of life die within such a short period of time—I feel like I should feel something, just as it happens. Like a pinch, or a noise, or lightheaded. Because we are all connected. Right? Aren’t we?
While driving to Healdsburg last Saturday, I had a big idea. Actually it was more of a big awareness, blooming out loud as I was talking with Stephanie. Recently I’ve kept a few of these “big” ideas to myself, rather than blog about them, especially when they seem like something I could build (in other words, some kind of web application). This makes me wonder: how many other people keep their big ideas to themselves, for fear that someone else might steal them? How many big ideas have lived and died unshared in the course of human history?
It strikes me that one of the reasons our energies flag while working on our big idea projects (if we even get that far) is that no one else ever finds out about them. The ideal of a lone artist making art for her own sake doesn’t really carry over into the world of programming. At least not for me. But then there’s something unintuitively social about programming. Especially and inherently when applied to the web. Which is probably why it’s a great reason to be an employed programmer. The whole nature of my work is built around doing things for others. That people already depend on me is a daily motivator.
But outside of a traditional work environment, if we could overcome this fear of people stealing our ideas long enough to share them, we might actually attract other people’s interest, whether solely for the end product, or—even better—for participation in the making. And I’m pretty sure that every bit of external influence would increase the probability of something actually getting done. I mean I’d be ecstatic if someone was interested in an idea of mine enough to want to contribute to it.
I linked to the following quote last August, and I think it’s totally relevant here. Linus Torvalds perfectly debunks the imagined tension between sharing our ideas and keeping them to ourselves when asked by ITBusiness.ca whether he worried about losing control of his “intellectual property” by open sourcing Linux:
“First off, even if you’re the smartest man on Earth, and you write something really interesting, it will take you years to do. In other words, it will take you time before it’s really even worth stealing. So if you start making it public early on, don’t worry about people and companies trying to steal your work. They’ll probably not even know about your work, and they’ll certainly not think that it’s worth stealing. And by the time it is worth misusing, the project is already well enough known that people can’t really misuse it on a big scale without getting caught.”
So what was my idea? That will have to wait for another post.
It was the policy of the Pflugerville Independent School District (located just north of Austin, Texas) that all high school boys come to school with their whiskers shaved. “Whiskers,” it was explained to me, were facial hairs growing on the chin, neck, and cheeks. Mustaches somehow were exempt.
One morning, I got sent to the principal’s office for distributing unapproved literature on school grounds. The remaining copies of the underground newspaper I helped produce were confiscated, and my band of co-conspirators was given a stern talking to. Then I got pulled aside on a technicality. The head principal decided that the facial hair on my chin (that I so wanted to let grow into a goatee) merited a shave.
In the principal’s office was a large glass jar of pink Bic razors, which a student could buy for 25 cents, were he caught in violation of the facial hair code. The principal “loaned” me a quarter, handed me a razor, and directed me to the bathroom. I considered shaving—even though I didn’t know how, I’d always used an electric shaver—but I ended up just sitting there on the toilet contemplating my situation. Eventually I decided that I was not going to submit.
I emerged from the bathroom, and he became enraged at my “willful insubordination.” He turned red, quite literally. So I was sent off to a day of in-school suspension.
At some point, maybe it was after I was released, maybe it was the next day, I found myself explaining what happened to my 11th grade AP English teacher. She told me about a friend who had to cut his hair as a condition of getting a new job. I think her point was that even in “the real world” adults sometimes have to sacrifice their personal style.
I immediately seized on a key difference. He had a choice. He didn’t have to take that job if he wanted to keep his hair. But I was forced to go to high school. I had no choice. And what sort of stupid job would force someone to cut their hair? At the time I was also growing my hair out, primarily to challenge another asinine policy: dictating that a boy’s hair be no longer than the top of his collar. Male ponytails were also verboten. In public high school!
Anyway, her reasoning just wasn’t working on me. I felt completely justified in my disobedience. And then she hit me with a zinger: “If you’re not in class, I cannot teach you.”
Anyways, the moral of this story is not that you shouldn’t be rebellious, but that some times there are unintended consequences of doing so. So be prepared. In high school, I sucked it up and found ways to “stay out of trouble”…so that I wouldn’t miss class. In “adult” life, I find that “choosing my battles” is a constant balance.
December being a month of birthdays (I’m 28 now btw!) and holidays and families, each Friday afternoon is like an appetizer before the greater celebration to come. One week closer.
