Outwardly my car seemed fine this morning. I remember trying to open it and finding it odd that all the door locks unsprung apart from the one on the driver’s door, which only came half way up. The door wouldn’t open. I clicked it a few more times and the problem was solved. I got in and my passenger said, “Shall I just push all this stuff on to the floor?” My car is usually messy so I just said “Yes, of course”. The trouble entering the vehicle was soon forgotten.
Later in the car alone I looked at the mess on the floor by the passenger seat and saw all my car insurance documents, and amongst them a spare bulb for one of the brake lights. I was confused. These are usually kept in the glove compartment. What were they doing on the floor? Had my passenger actually decided that my permission to chuck stuff on the floor had extended to them clearing out my any stuff they could find anywhere in the car? Surely I would have noticed, but I couldnÂ’t make any sense of it. Had I forgotten looking for something in the glove compartment myself and then not returned everything into its place? I opened the glove compartment, which was almost completely empty. I would have remembered. The idea that someone had been in my car crossed my mind, but all the doors had been locked and the windows were unbroken. A ghost perhaps? A ghost of one of the people I failed to kill
in my recent near miss, who was annoyed that my ultimately safe driving had deprived him of existence and so heÂ’d decided to haunt me? A ghost of that ghost would be a more realistic explanation: I had caused the ghost to be obliterated from existence and was now being haunted by the ghost of that ghost.
Slowly I accepted that someone must have broken in to cause this mess, but was still at a loss to explain it, though remembering the difficulty with the door assumed that that must be connected. Then I remembered that a couple of nights ago I had been woken by the sound of a car alarm going off. This happens a fair deal in my street and there is one car alarm that goes off quite regularly. Somewhere in my brain a small voice was saying, “But that’s not the regular alarm. In fact it sounds a bit like yours.” But then the alarm stopped and the rest of my brain told the stupid paranoid voice to shut up, because it was clearly mistaken.
I had also been stupid enough to leave the cradle for my sat nav attached to the windscreen. When I had first got it I had taken it off every time I used it, aware that I was making it obvious to thieves that I had sat nav which might make them want to break into my car. But then I got tired of taking it down and assumed that the thieves would know that I wasnÂ’t so stupid as to leave up the cradle and hide the sat nav in the car. Especially not in the glove compartment which surely only an idiot would do. I was offended to realise that some thief had thought that I was idiot enough to do this and had decided to check his theory. Yes, I was idiot enough to not take down the cradle, but please. IÂ’m not totally stupid. This had been a game of poker and I was confident that the robbers would realise that anyone with the bravado to leave the cradle in the car would have the intelligence to take the expensive bit into the house. My non-bluff had been called though and I was the loser because although the thief had not got my sat nav he had damaged my car. I wasnÂ’t sure how yet. I am idiot enough to think that with modern lock technology the only way to get into a car is to smash the window and grab. On getting to my destination I discovered that there is another way. Please do not use this information to break into cars, but you can jemmy off the outside bit of the lock and then stick some appropriately shaped bit of metal into the hole and then the door will open for you. I think it might even be more technical than that.
It was an annoying realisation and one made worse by the fact that it probably wouldnÂ’t have happened if I had kept up my paranoid routine of taking down the cradle. How annoying.
