Urban Mountaineering

Imagine my surprise tonight when, standing in the kitchen of my apartment, overlooking the garden, I hear a scraping sound directly outside. Despite the dusk, I can see a figure coming down the rainpipe. For several seconds, I'm stunned by the feeling of incongruity. What is a stranger doing crawling down my wall, into my garden? It's impossible, and therefore hard to acknowledge as true. But there's no ignoring this, so I call out, "Excuse me?!" The guy, standing in my garden, responds,"I'm, I'm just busy for a moment", which isn't much of an explanation. He gets on top of my shed, over it and into the alley behind it. Even now, the notion of burglary hardly occurs to me. In fact, uncertain about what do to with what I just saw, I simply sit down and eat dinner.
It's not until about an hour and a half later that Lloyd, my neighbor from the first floor, rings my bell. He tells me he left his kitchen window open (directly above mine) and found his apartment broken into. Some money was stolen, including some change from a jar. I feel guilty, explain what I saw, and offer to accompany him to the police station immediately. We walk there, occasionally uttering baffled phrases. Once there, a cop tells us that we both need to come back on separate occasions, Lloyd to file a report, me to look at pictures or describe the burglar. Walking back, Lloyd explains that his balcony was raided two years ago --two cases of beer were stolen. We both wonder how someone would find beer worth stealing. At home, we exchange phone numbers to keep in touch.
I've learned before that people are very unwilling to react to unusual, even dangerous circumstances. During a fire in a department store, many people in the store's restaurant died while waiting for their check to arrive. The fire just didn't fit into their routine, so they ignored it. Also, the bigger the amount of people watching a fight, a drowning or someone having a seizure, the less likely any one person is to intervene (in fact, the chance of intervention drops to zero at around 8 people). All this shows that people are automatons to a high degree. It's not nice to be reminded that you are an automaton of sorts, especially when you're not supposed to be.

Posted by cronopio at 12:02 AM, October 26, 2001 | Comments (0)