Here goes a rant in 3…2…What is it about human nature that if something is “out in the open” that many people feel that it means that this “something” is available for them to take? Maybe it’s not human nature that lends people to feel free to take things that aren’t theirs so much as it is that they don’t listen to their inner angels that prevent most of us from committing what is, for all intent, a crime. It is still a crime to steal from others, right?!
So here’s the story – on Christmas day the lower ball joint on my 4Runner fell apart…here’s what happens when the lower ball joint fails on your car (you’ve seen this before):
I called a tow truck and, since I wasn’t very far from the house, I had him bring it to my house and put it on the curb on the street in front of the house. The tow truck operator has actually managed to get the truck to balance on the wheel not even a foot away from the curb. I was impressed but I knew I couldn’t leave it there like that. So I jacked up the front end and put a jack stand on the frame just behind the wheel. While I knew the jack stand would hold the truck up as an extra precaution I left the jack stand under the front end. I removed the handle from the jack and left the truck like that.
Now while I will take responsibility for not getting back to the truck in a timely manner that does not excuse what happened next. After about two weeks someone, at some time, saw that the jack was just “sitting there” and thought to themselves “I will take this jack since it’s not really doing anything anyways”…
I would like to think that they assessed the situation and realized that the jack was not what was holding the truck up. I would also like to think that they needed a jack for some reason and didn’t just take it because it was there. I would like to give whoever took it every benefit of the doubt as to why they took it…but in the end, it was still a crime and they had no right to do so. Maybe they needed it to jack up a car that was on top of another person…but then they still should have brought it back.
When I walk past some object on somebody’s property I don’t even feel the temptation to take it since they just left it out…why can’t more people be like that? I’m not perfect…but I guess I got that going for me at least.
