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ARTICLE 117: the van SEPTEMBER 2003 if you are a regular reader of this column probably you know that i moved into a new place a few months ago! if you are like me, then anywhere you live will probably have some people around who like to drink a lot and make noise. whether it is college students or the chronically economically disadvantaged, these people will live nearby! unless you have a lot of money though, you have to choose between living in the suburbs and living in the city, and i do not want to buy a lawn mower or go to strip malls so i have to live in the city! in my new place, the noisy neighbors live in a house that borders on an alley that runs behind my apartment building. i am pretty sure they are contractors! when most people say "contractor" they mean someone who programs for a few months or gets hired to design things, but in the midwest it means "someone who works at construction jobs for long enough to buy a few months worth of alcohol and possibly other drugs, and then quits to use the alcohol and drugs"! they are always sitting on their porch with giant bottles of fortified wine and yelling and banging on things. i do not know how many people live in the house, but they have an old rusted-out van which they all use for transportation! it has severe engine problems so they have to pump the gas for several minutes before it can go anywhere, and it will not go over fifteen miles an hour. whenever it is running, it emits terrible clouds of black smoke and growls and rumbles as though the fuel tank is full of rocks and the engine is trying to chew them up!! BLLLGLGGGRRRRRRrrrrRRRRRrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRR!@!@ i have been sitting in my apartment all summer long listening to this van come and go, so i decided to do something about it! since they bang on things pretty often they are probably good at fixing things, but maybe they drink too much to figure out how to use the internet! so i got online and looked up some information on old vans. i figured i could find some instructions on how to put a muffler on a van and fix the engine so it runs on gasoline instead of rocks!! after looking around a bit i found something surprising. there was a recall on 1984 ford econoline vans because they catch on fire easily! OH NO!! i told the internet, even though my neighbors are loud and probably drunk at this very moment, they do not deserve to die in a van fire!! i printed off the information (http://www.autosafety.org/article.php?scid=96&did=525 is the address, if you have one of these vans you need to read it!!) and stapled it together in a packet so they would not lose any of the pages. they were not sitting out on the porch (i think that 9am to noon is a time reserved for indoor drinking) so i took the packet and put it in their mailbox. then i thought, what if they do not open the mailbox because they know it never has alcohol in it?! it would be a disaster!! to make sure they could find the information, i looked around in the alley and found a brick, and threw it through the window on the driver's side of the van. then i leaned inside and put the recall information on the driver's seat. that way it is a foolproof method of making sure they see the information before they try to drive the van anywhere and possibly get set on fire! i walked back home and was pretty satisfied with the job until i realized: what if they are too drunk to see the recall information and they drive somewhere anyway and catch on fire!! i grabbed a steak knife out of a drawer in my kitchen and headed back to the alley. the van was still there so i used the knife to cut holes in all of its tires so they would not accidentally drive the van somewhere and die in a terrible auto blaze!! i did not leave any information about who i was because helping people is its own reward! i did not want the contractors to come to my house and try to pay me lots of money for saving their lives, because when it comes down to it, the internet is the real hero. THE INTERNET: SAVING LIVES EVERY DAY! thank you, the internet! (back to the writing index page)