Beware the Joaninator

Yeah, I said I'd do this yesterday, Mom, but life happened and as it is I can't even do the mega-update I was planning. Here's a brief summary of my current status for those just sitting on the edge of their seats. I'll be posting details on each of these later as I get time alone.

• The move was a success, although I threw my back in the process and was in agony for a couple of weeks afterwards. (I need some medication now. I'm fresh out.)
• The new apartment, although smaller, is far more intelligently laid out and outfitted so it's actually much more comfortable than the older, larger place. And it has a seated toilet. I can read again finally!
• Lucas adapted almost instantly to the new environment and is entering his "terrible twos". Wilful but cute, so that makes up for it.
• I've been doing a little bit of daily teaching every day for a bit of spending money.
• We're actively looking for our own apartment now.

Each of those items will get expanded upon within the next week (knock on Lucas' head).

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Now to explain the title.

There was one little incident in the move that was a bit negative. (I mean aside from shoving a shard of glass from a broken ink bottle deep into my thumb while unpacking.) The incident was unpleasant, but I emerged from it with a newfound respect for the toughness of my wife.

The complex we lived in was a "secure" complex with on-site, live-in security and all that jazz. All of this is run by the building manager, Mr. Peng. Mr. Peng is an irritating tick of a man; the kind of guy that shakes your hand and leaves you feeling mysteriously oily. Having him in charge of security is kind of like having the RCMP investigate its own officers' misconduct: futile and a recipe for disaster.

One thing, for example, that Mr. Peng does is he rents out empty apartments in the complex off the books to his friends. He also treats the security guards like dirt and is suspected of entering tenant apartments when they are not present (he's never been directly caught at this but there's lots of circumstantial evidence).

After moving, Joan and I went back to the apartment to clean it. We decided that the school treated us decently so we're going to be decent and clean up the place for them. This was a huge job that was shaping up to be a multi-day thing. (Marion, your "Magic Erasers" were utterly defeated by the kitchen. I was shocked.) During our time there, Joan had her scooter plugged in to charge up. When she left to pick up lunch, she didn't want to carry the charger all the way up to the fifth floor only to carry it all the way back down again when she got back. Instead she put it in the (secured) stairwell under the stairs.

When she came back it was gone.

She knew right away that Mr. Peng had taken it. Why? Because he'd tried it earlier and was caught in the act. At the time he pretended he was looking for the owner of the charger, but in reality he was walking away from the place he found it and doing so rather furtively. So when it went missing for real, he was the first (and only) suspect.

Joan worked herself up into a real fury over this. (Mental note: never steal anything from Joan. Ever. For any reason.) She was angrier than I've ever seen her before. And in the process we cooked up a scheme to get the thing back.

Joan wrote a note saying, basically, "my husband saw who took it; we won't say anything if it's returned to us within an hour". She posted this note on the building manager's door. This led to Mr. Peng's first error. He came to confront us about the "outrageous accusation". He challenged me to my face to say that I'd seen him do it. I hadn't, but he didn't know this. There are lots of places he could have been seen from and he knew it. Without any friendly gesture and without anything he could hang any hopes upon I nodded certainly. Yes, I'd seen him walk away with it.

This was the gamble. Had he stuck to his guns he'd have left room for doubt and it would have been a "he said; she said" scenario with no resolution. He was, however, shaken by the absolute positive he'd got from me there. Suddenly he wasn't so sure he'd gotten away with it.

First he tried the "I'll help you find out who took it" route. This was mistake #1. He went out and acted all concerned, asking any of the tenants outdoors if they'd seen anybody who didn't belong entering or exiting the complex. A woman who'd been outside with her son for a long time and who'd been near where anybody entering or leaving would have to have passed said "no, no strangers entered or left". This eliminated an outsider. The rest of the tenants in the building were not on the list because a) they were mostly gone and b) we're talking about people who are making a MINIMUM of a hundred grand a year.

Next, shaken by me saying I saw him walking away with the thing in his hands, he went to his apartment to show me the thing I must have seen: a plastic bowl of sorta-kinda the same colour. This was mistake #2. In doing this he placed himself at the scene of the crime at the time it happened. When he showed us the bowl, I just flatly laughed at him, explaining that I can tell the difference between a small, rectangular light cyan object and a large, round dark cyan object at only 5 stories. (Hell, I could probably spot the difference a block away!)

Now is when the Joaninator sprang into action. She gave the man a tongue-lashing I've never seen her give anybody before. (Hopefully I never see it again.) In the process Mrs. Peng joined the conversation and it turned into a three-way shouting match. A shouting match Joan won.

In the end she won the cruelest (and most appropriate) way I can even imagine. She threatened, in short, to expose Mr. Peng's sideline rental service. You know, not only threaten his livelihood, but to basically say "give this thing back or you're going to jail for something else I know about you".

For face reasons, of course, Mr. Peng couldn't admit he stole the thing. Instead he offered to pay for the missing charger "because we're such good friends". Joan phoned the dealer, got the price on the recharger and took the money. Then we left. And we didn't bother doing the deep cleaning we planned on because, frankly, we lost interest in being nice to the people running the building. Let them hire a cleaner now.

A little coda that was entertaining. The recharger cost 100RMB. When Joan went to get it, she told the story to the shop attendant who laughed and said it's too bad this wasn't known beforehand. The recharger, you see, was on special for 100RMB. Usually it was 150RMB and the shop staff all agreed that a thief should have been forced to pay the higher price.