The Steaming Rants of Ernie Wight

Tax and Tax again

It's hard to tell if the white stuff outside the cab is fog or cloud, I'm soaked to the skin after carrying crates to the doors, but nothing lands on the windscreen that the wipers can remove, and main beam shows a solid wall of white ahead. I crawl along on dipped beam until the sodium street lights of the next village give me a chance to see the road again. Sodium light cuts through the wet white stuff very well. I pay for those lights, together with the other house-owners in Wiltshire. A proportion of the council tax I pay each month is set down for street lighting. This annoys me, because where I live, there is no street lighting. I pay for other people to see while I have to stumble in the dark.

When I arrived back at the dairy, it was to find a complaint waiting for me. One of the garages had had some milk stolen from the crates, and asked if I could leave the milk closer to the door so that it was within the range of their security light. I knew their lighting system, and knew that it would not prevent the thefts, or even detect them. They had set the light up for energy conservation, and even a stupid thief would have no trouble in removing milk without getting caught on the security video. I knew this because I had had to do my own policing for a while, even though there was another proportion of my council tax earmarked for local policing.

It all began last century, when I was getting up at 6 each morning to drive to Nailsea, where I was testing the software used by oil and gas platforms to ensure it would not malfunction in the new century. My old silver scimitar was long overdue for some new parts in it, so when I ran out of petrol I assumed that the fuel gauge was playing up. I also realised that several times I was pulling into filling stations and finding the filler cap already open at the back of the car, and assumed that the locking catch was a bit worn. But one morning when the gauge showed empty and I knew I had filled the tank fully the previous night I realised that someone was stealing my petrol, or I had a major leak to deal with. The tank was sound.

I reported the theft to the local police, who said they would ad it to the list. What ? I asked. They explained that up to 20 siphoning crimes a week were being reported. I bought a locking petrol cap from Don. A week later, I went out to find the cap broken open, and the car empty of fuel. The policeman who came to see me tried to explain what was going on. The thefts were believed to be committed by one person, known to them, who had yet to be caught in the act, or stopped and found with the means to siphon petrol on him or in his car. They had tried staking out certain areas without success, in fact, no thefts had taken place at all on the nights when they were actively hunting him. I asked if they would stake out my car, but was told that they were forbidden to deploy manpower unless there was a reasonable chance of catching the culprit, and that didn't seem likely.

I set out to stop the thief myself. I bought radio paging alarms, and super-glued a magnet to the broken fuel cap, hiding a reed switch inside the fibreglass. When the cap was opened, the pager beeped. For three weeks I slept comfortably, until one morning I went out and found the cap slightly ajar, and the tank empty of fuel. I tested the alarm system, and found the transmitter was still working, it broke into the car radio when it was activated. The pager had drifted off frequency, and no longer responded to the broadcast. While hunting around, I came across my garden hose, now not only shorter, but cut into two halves, and realised why the thief was never stopped by the police with the tell-tale equipment on him; he was using my hose. And in addition to whatever it was he had used to break the locking petrol cap, he obviously had a knife on him.

I knew where the thief would strike, but not when. I dug out the neighbourhood watch reports and plotted the locations and dates of all reported petrol thefts, and looked for a pattern. There wasn't an obvious one, so I looked at the dates at which I knew for certain that my car had been attacked, and found two patterns. The thefts usually happened in the latter half of the week, and mostly when my girlfriend had come over to spend the night. Was she siphoning my petrol ? It was a bizarre thought. For some reason I had a clear picture of her son opening the filler cap on the back of my car. But the thefts made no sense. The only new advice the police could give was to park the car under a street light, of which there were none in my road. They did however admit that this thief was so brazen that even security lights didn't seem to deter him.

I settled on a simple solution. I bought a security light and trained it on the back of the car. With about three hours experimentation, I had the light set up so that someone could walk by the car without setting the light off, but anyone walking around the rear of the car brought the light on, and it would stay on for five minutes. Any movement within the five minute period would keep the light on, and after switching off it would activate immediately if fresh movement was detected. I then moved my bed so that I slept facing a bay window looking directly at the back of the car.

It was not easy to sleep with headlights coming through the windows, but after three poor nights I was just dozing off when the light flared up. I leapt out of bed and peered cautiously out of the window. I had to wait for two minutes until an arm reached round from the darkened side of the car and carefully pushed the filler cap open. Another long pause, and then he moved fully into the light. He was carrying a short length of green hose, which I knew he had just cut from the length I had left laying where I always kept the hose. The next step was intriguing. I had been puzzling over how he could siphon up to eighteen gallons from my car without having to have a chain of little cans to ferry the petrol to his own car. He didn't bother with cans, just put my empty dustbin behind the car, sucked on the hose to get the flow running, carefully placed a piece of chipboard over the dustbin, and walked right past my bay window off into the darkness.

I phoned 999, reported that a petrol theft was in progress, and told the controller to ask the responding car to make a quiet approach. Five minutes later, as I stood by the window wondering where the thief was, the phone rang. It was the police, asking if the thief had very thick glasses ? I hissed that no, he didn't, and he had very probably heard the phone ring and was well away by now. Another five minutes, and the phone rang again. The police had detained two men just down the road from me, and would I like to go and make an identification ?

I looked in though the left hand door of the patrol car, and didn't recognise the figure, but around the other side of the car there was no mistaking the person in the back seat. I had after all been watching him for several minutes under 500 Watts of sodium light from a distance of thirty feet. "You", I said. "Me ?" he replied, sounding aggrieved. And he looked remarkably like June's son.

Over a period of 9 weeks I had lost over 80 gallons of petrol, and a spare can. When he went to court he was fined about 75 pounds, with about 80 pounds costs. I never received any compensation for my troubles, and still have a high electricity bill. I still pay my council tax so that other people can have their street lights, and police presence. I know that any thief could walk off with the milk from this particular garage because the light has not been set up to remain on when there is movement within the swept area. I know this because it makes my life awkward as I try to read the note left in the window saying how much milk that garage wants. Shortly after my arrival, the light goes back out again, and stays off for three minutes no matter how much I move around trying to force it back on again A clever thief would back up into the light area, facing away from the camera all the time, wait until the light goes out, then walk away with the crates without ever showing his face to the cameras.

As an aside to all this, while the thefts were taking place I was telling everybody what was going on. The advice I got from everybody was of the same form : Hide a big dog in the car, wait until he's started the petrol flowing and through a lighted match at him, wire the filer cap up to the mains. Everyone, it seems, wanted to maim or kill him. And these were engineers, accountants, educated people. Once, this person had been caught close to a car in a pub car-park, and had been slightly beaten up before being handed over to the police, as a result of which the court had decided not to bring any charge against him.

This is therefore the time for me to qualify my hatred of the fast-track-visa system by saying that I do not want to see Indian programmers hounded out of the country, corner shops looted and burnt, restaurants trashed. They have only taken advantage of a business loophole that has been opened up in front of them. My complaint is that I have been the victim of unfair practice which has denied me the right to try and compete to keep my share of the business. My grievance is with the government who have been stupid enough to issue the visas without checking the validity of the applications. Sadly, I think it will take more than a security light to get me out of this problem.

And I still have to pay the council tax, even though I have lost the means to pay it. I'll say this about injustice, it's blind.