Ever been in a situation where you are so tired of something bad always happening to you that you go a little overboard in trying to deal with the problem? Some 15 years ago I was sharing a house with two friends of mine: Donny & Jones. In the first 6 months there, we were being hounded by constant attempts by burglars to break into our property. Car alarms were going off every other night usually followed by the sound of running footsteps of a panicked intruder preparing to scramble over the wall. On two or three occasions the thugs managed to get away with spot lights of one car and seriously damaged the locks on another. We were really fed up with the sleepless nights and then Donny had this brilliant idea! "Let's wait for them!" He says, excitedly.
"Um… who?" I said.
"The tsotsi's" he said with immense enthusiasm. (Tsotsi is a colloquial expression here in Southern Africa for a thug, a robber or a thief). I was a little uneasy, so I asked him how. His idea was that we go out into the yard and sit in the bushes at about 2am in the morning for at least an hour and a half and, here's the hard part…wait. He organised himself a knobkerrie fashioned from possibly the hardest plastic known to man. And I found myself a thick piece of wood which I converted into my "rod of correction and retribution." I can't imagine what we both aimed to achieve as we didn't know how many thugs would one day show up and whether or not they had a firearm. And the thought of sitting in the dew layered, mosquito and bug infested undergrowth (we had to be hidden!) didn't really have much appeal, at least not at 2am in the morning. But I did it anyway. Naturally Jones refused. Said that we were crazy. Then one night we were "on duty" in the bushes, cold, damp, tired and irritable, when we heard a noise next door. Donny signaled for us to approach the wall and, because only I was tall enough, asked me to take a peep next door as his sweat palms tightened their grip on his plastic …um thingy. I looked over the wall expecting to spot intruders breaking into the house next door. What I did see was my next door neighbour, who we hardly knew, apparently a little drunk, banging the door so his girlfriend could open up. It was about 3:30am and I guessed that he had been to a night club. Open and shut case. It seemed that Donnie had a different idea why this chap was knocking on his door at this time of the morning and what he said next confirmed this: "Is he still there?"
"ER…yah!"
"Still at the door?"
"Well…it is the way in, isn't it?"
Why don't you ask him what he's doing?
"Excuse me? I can't do that!"
"Just do it! Why is he out this time of the night during the week?"
"Why are we out during the week at this ridiculous hour?
Our whispering must have alerted the neighbour because he began to approach the wall and then wanted to know what we were doing outside. Really embarrassing. We never did catch anyone in our nightly vigils and "operation barn-owl" was soon suspended due to lack of sleep….
