It was with some degree of amusement that I observed the neighbors dog trashing some sheets and clothes that were hung on her owners washing line whilst downing my hot chocolate this morning.
Amusing because despite my yelling and jumping up and down on my deck and generally looking foolish flailing my hands and gnashing my teeth, the dog seemed only mildly interested but if anything was spurned on to even greater levels of destruction - to the detriment of the unfortunate washing!
I suppose I should have gone over there and made a more sincere attempt to stop the ruinage but the idea of the neighbors returning home for some reason to find me in their back yard with handfuls of their torn washing, running from their dog did not inspire me to act gallantly...
It did however; remind me of a little incident that happened many years ago when I was sharing a house with several friends.
There were fours of us (all guys) living in a lease property, sharing the rent, power, phone etc, etc. We had been living there for several months before we began to notice a sure and steady decline in the number of jeans and T-Shirts that we possessed. We finally twigged that one of us didn’t have a huge pile while the rest of us were in deficit and it was to our bitter disappointment we discovered that we were all less two or three pairs each and many more T-Shirts also.
It took us some time to deduce that our clothes were being filched from our washing line during the night and further investigations revealed that the thieves were coming over our back wall, through the vacant part of the section at the bottom of the yard and up to our washing line situated in the middle of the used part of the yard.
We decided collectively that the first element of our defense would be to clear away some of the vines and climbers that had over many years become greatly overgrown and thickly covered both sides of the back wall. This it seemed, allowed intruders to observe our movements while remaining virtually invisible to us from the house and also from casual onlookers or people in neighboring houses.
After this relatively simple operation we were delighted to find that underneath all of the overgrowth was a three line barbed wire fence at the top of the wall. Which, having now been freed from the entangling vines appeared as an impromptu second line of defense for our washing line.
The other lads however had got to talking about this one day while I was at work and arriving home one afternoon I was approached on masse to offer my opinion on electrifying the barbed wire fence. Being quite a lot younger than I am now the idea of an electric barbed wire fence fascinated and appealed to me...
So, using our combined ingeniousness we set about insulating the wire from the fence strainers using sections of garden hose and I was dispatched to the nearest automobile wreckers to obtain a cheap CDI ignition system from a car.
Using this piece of equipment as the fence energizer had the combined advantage of being both cheap and our intruders would be spared the need to touch the bare wire as the voltage and available energy from the ignition system would mean, coming to a distance within half an inch of the wire would see an extremely high energy discharge, straight up your ‘tender bits’.
We stashed the whole contraption complete with old car battery in a nail box and concealed it with a pile of the vines we had ripped off the fence and sat about for the better part of the night waiting to see if our efforts would be rewarded.
Nothing.
So I recharged the battery during the next day and set it all up the following evening.
Nothing.
And so it went for the next three nights. By the sixth night everyone had pretty much lost interest and I persevered only because I thought it would be a shame to give up now and have the thieves come back and rob us again the night we didn’t have the battery charged.
Sometime just after midnight on that sixth evening we were alerted by the dog, who until this time had failed to detect our ‘midnight shoppers’. She was whining and clawing at the back door and although we could hear nothing, her interest in getting outside attracted the attention of us all.
We armed ourselves with an assortment of ungainly objects (I had a rock...??? Oh yeah we were hard core!) and after letting the dog go first we made our way across the back yard.
Somewhere around the clothes line we heard the first sounds of a frantic scuffling and heard the dog growl and then howl and we were nearly bowled over as she came scuttling past us heading quickly in the opposite direction, tail tucked firmly between her legs, ears flat down on her head.
Generally speaking, people who take on snarling dogs within the dogs own territory should be approached with a great deal of caution! We needn’t have worried.
Two young men were trapped in the barbed wire fence and every second or so they would twist and writhe like a pair of synchronized monkeys in a tree. We assumed that the dog had attempted to bite the shoe of the guy closest to the ground and had shared a little in the energy that was making such beautiful blue sparks on our two captured crims.
Tempting as it was to leave them both there making funny noises and flexing like a pair of retarded bodybuilders we started to worry that they could end up badly hurt. There was already an odd smell of burnt hair or flesh and also the ozone smell you get after a big electrical storm. I disconnected the battery while my flat mates informed our hapless criminals that if they tried to make a run for it we would light their dumbasses straight back up again.
I guess it was a testament to the pain they must have been through because as soon as I turned the fence off and they could speak properly they started pleading with us to never turn it back on again. They were a little cut around the legs and hands from the barbs in the wire and both seemed to have bitten their tongues or cheeks and were bleeding slightly from their mouths.
Such had been the extent of their writhing and struggling that we had to cut them free and so destroy our beloved fence.
Under the threat of much violence we tied their wrists with sticky tape and dragged their now very sorry asses back up to the house where we gagged them with more sticky tape and applied even more tape to their legs. When we felt that escape would be impossible we heaved them into the bathtub one on top of the other, removed their gags and questioned them about our missing clothes. Having recovered a little by this time they became adamant that this was not their intention and that they had never been over our fence or into our yard before.
Collectively, none of us was convinced; they had attempted to come over the fence in exactly the same place that we had deduced somebody had been over before. I went back down to the bottom of the yard and recovered the nail box with our DIY fence energizer and battery, took it back up to the house and put it down on the bathroom vanity where both of our would be thieves could see it.One of the other lads put the plug in the tub and turned on the tap…
Nobody had said a word during this process but the intention was apparently clear enough and the confessions were readily forthcoming! They admitted to stealing from us on several occasions and had hocked our gear off at one of the local op-shops. Disgusted, we re-gagged them and locked the bathroom door.
For some time we considered calling the cops but I was unsure how we might fear in a legal sense with regard to having installed a barbed wire electric fence which by no means came anywhere near fitting the legal safety requirements that local councils dictate in their by-laws.
What we decided on in the end was the old ‘scare the shit out of em’ approach, so two of us took the ‘good guy’ role while the other two took the ‘badass’ approach and we staged an argument complete with scuffling and apparent pushing and shoving outside the door of the bathroom.
The ‘badasses’ tried to convince us that we should just break a spade over each of their heads and bury the bodies down in the vacant overgrown part of the section where nobody would ever know.
We, the ’good guys’ tried to reason with our counterparts saying that these guys would no doubt be missed, that others were bound to know what they had been up to, inevitably sending trouble our way and that we should just call the cops and be done with it.
We let this to-ing and fro-ing continue all the while knowing our sneaky little friends could hear every word. We culminated the argument with a shouting match that saw the ‘badasses’ storm off, apparently pissed with us for being so soft and leaving the house in a huff.
The two of us remaining went back into the bathroom – un-gagged our pair of thieves and asked them for their names and addresses, the address they gave us was only two streets away from ours so it seemed to add up. We dragged them outside one at a time and released them, telling them that they had 30 mins to get home and make anyone else in their house aware that the police were on their way.
We never called the cops – tempting as it was, common sense prevailed and we figured we would probably be the ones in the most trouble.
But hey, we never lost anything else off the washing line for the remainder of the time we lived there and I always wonder if those two chaps ever stole anything again – EVER!
Currently listening to:
The Black Crowes – Shake your Moneymaker
No comments:
Post a Comment