In the Honda, there were two attempts on the catalytic converter while I was sleeping.  I woke up and thwarted both of them.  The third attempt on the cat was successful, as I was not sleeping in the vehicle that night.

I write because the fourth happened a couple of days ago, and is fresh in my mind, and has moved me also to consider the great technological changes to criminal enterprise that I have lived to see.  Out of all the vehicles parked on that block, in a decidedly upscale neighborhood, how did the little punk on his bike know that the door to my car was unlocked?

I believe that it was.  I put this down to the unsettling time change that the powers afflict us with, still, and long after our technologically-enhanced farmers have any use for it.  When I get into the car from the office, to drive to my sleeping spot, I hit the master door lock button.  And, when I get to the sleeping spot, wondering if I actually did hit it the first time, I will often hit it again.  It’s a solid fixture of the drive to the sleeping spot … unless a person is all discombobulated, having, for instance, the day before, locked oneself out of the office, with the alarm off and the AC running.  A person in such a state will drive to the sleeping spot without having hit the door lock.  I think I did.

At the sleeping spot, curled up in the back seat, under my gnome-in-the-dark blankie, playing phone games before bed (I should have ceased with the phone games an hour ago [I often don’t]), it’s about 12:30 a.m., when I hear substantial noises:  rustling and flapping on the body of the car.  A cat bounding over the hood will make that sort of noise.  It’s happened before.  The rodents who occasionally try to tunnel up into the vehicle from the ground are not as loud as this.  There is one spate of the noise that attracts my attention.  And then another begins.  I pull the gnome blankie off, and the driver’s side door has been opened.  A smallish arm and shoulder are on their way into the vehicle, when I howl, and I mean howl, very loudly:  “WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING !!!!”

Not a sound from the punk.  The door is closed, and the punk is swiftly onto his bike and down the road.  And now I am left to wonder: how in hell did the little punk know the door was unlocked?  He wasn’t trying door handles all the way down the block.  That I would heard long before he got to mine.  He had some kind of god-damned scanner, and I want to know who makes such a thing, and why it is permitted that they make such a thing, and how did the punk get hold of it?  Such a thing has to be expensive, doesn’t it? 

And then I imagine legions of little punks on bikes prowling all over the East Bay under the auspices of some Faganesque creature who looks astonishingly like Elon Musk.  Having been thwarted by the catalytic converter cage, Fagan has come up with this?  Why aren’t all these little punks learning something constructive to do?  And if Fagan simply cannot embrace a constructive outlet for his craftiness, why is he not jailed for good?

On the other hand, this is one long-standing quandary … a couple of millennia, at least.  And four incidents in ten years is hardly horrific. 

Make that five.  There was the time I came back to the BART parking lot to find a quarter of the Honda up on an abandoned jack, and the cops waiting to see if the owner might come back for it.  Sigh.