Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Day 4 - upset community

It does not take a lot of criminals to upset a small community. One busy thief is quite enough, and this one has been working hard.

First we discovered was that he has been moving bikes around. Volda is having a bike shuffle - he has stole bikes, used them for a short distance, left them behind and moved to something else. Just by where the police found the computer from the boat, he stole a scooter - beating it up severely in order to start it without the key.

With a scooter his range expanded, and it would be possible for him to move more stuff quicker, like a load of wine boxes and fishing poles way up into the hillside. The scooter was found, still running, in another garden as the house owner returned Monday morning. The owner was the daughter of a colleague, a girl who used to be in the same class as my son.

In a small place everything somehow interlinks, what happens to one happens to a whole group of people, and a series of events like this involves not just neighbourhoods, but the whole little town. And as the police officers chasing him are the brothers, sisters, daughters, sons, husbands, fathers, mothers and in other ways related to the people who are the victims, an event like this does not become impersonal or dismissed. My colleague felt that he was dismissed over the scooter, but Monday the officers had been called out the night before to catch the guy, and was running like crazy to find all he had displaced. Volda has a significant amount of gardens for them to search through. And while I can understand my colleague's feeling that the banged up smashed violated scooter had deserved more attention, I can't be angry with the police that it wasn't so high priority. I would, of course, have felt differently if it was my computer they appeared to ignore.

This is a frustrating, unpleasant experience. But it is also a very interesting one, one which shows me new sides of the community and human interaction. See, see all the pain one "griefer" can bring? And there I got to relate this to games as well!

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