You Must Be From Away

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I’m not exaggerating.

Over here, if you commit a crime that isn’t murder you’ll be arrested but they won’t lock you up.
(If you do something marginally less serious, but you’re likely to skedaddle, they just might lock you up as well. Might…)

They’ll take down your details, verify your address and send you off home.

No bail – just go homer and wait.

Then – at some stage, – you’ll get a summons to court, you get tried and you’ll probably get probation.

Especially likely if you’re socio-economically fairly well up the ladder. You might even be able to pay a chunk of folding stuff to a worthy cause and even avoid conviction.

So it was with great surprise that I heard about a TV journalist who was caught with his snout firmly in the trough, willingly accepting contributions from all and sundry to appear on the box and got 2 years and a bit.

Behind bars.

I’m not for a situation where you have 20% of the populace with a criminal conviction (UK) or 10% of black men in their 20s and 30s in jail, but if you catch a bunch of people trying to install skimming devices on ATMs, I really don’t think a slap on the wrist is the answer.

Of course, that’s just my opinion.

I could be wrong.

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Recently, I was diagnosed with A.A.A.D.D. – Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder.

This is how it manifests itself:

Decide to water the garden.

Turn on the hose, look over at the car and decide it needs washing.

Start toward the garage, notice mail on the porch table that I brought up from the mail box earlier.

Decide to go through the mail before I wash the car.

Lay my car keys on the table, put the junk mail in the recycling bin.
Which is full.

So I decide to put the bills back on the table and empty the recycling bin.

But then I think: since I’m going to be near the mailbox when I empty the recycling bin anyway, I may as well pay the bills first.

Take my check book off the table – only one check left.

My extra checks are in my desk in the study, so I go inside the house to my desk where I find the cup of tea I’d been drinking.

I’m going to look for my checks, but first I need to push the tea aside so that I don’t accidentally knock it over.

Tea’s getting cold so I decide to make another cup.

As I head toward the kitchen with the cold tea, I notice that a vase of flowers on the counter needs water.

Put the tea on the counter and discover my reading glasses that I’ve been searching for all morning.

I decide I better put them back on my desk, but first I’m going to water the flowers.

I set the glasses back down on the counter, fill a container with water and suddenly spot the TV remote on the kitchen table.

I realize that at some stage I’ll be looking for the remote but I won’t remember that it’s on the kitchen table, so I decide to put it back in the den where it belongs,

But first I’ll water the flowers.

I pour some water in the flowers, but quite a bit of it spills on the floor.

So I set the remote back on the table, get some towels and wipe up the spill.

Then I head down the hall trying to remember what I was planning to do.

At the end of the day:

The car isn’t washed

The bills aren’t paid

There is a cold cup of tea sitting on the counter

The flowers don’t have enough water,

There is still only 1 check in my check book,

I can’t find the remote,

I can’t find my glasses,

And I don’t remember what I did with the car keys.

Then when I try to figure out why nothing got done today, I’m really baffled because I know I was busy all bloody day,

And I’m really tired.