The Drastic Action of Do-Good-ism
Doing something wrong to do something right.
On my way from my car to the elevator in the airport parking garage, I noticed someone's beautiful Volvo still had its headlights on. I stopped walking. Did this person just arrive, and the lights would shut off automatically in a few minutes? I considered that. But then I considered the alternative, that they left them on. As I stood there, I pictured someone returning from a short trip or a long wait for a loved one's arrival to a dead battery and a bad time. The car's probably locked anyway. And what lunatic would open a stranger's car door and molest their headlight control stalk?
Me. I am the lunatic.
This happened yesterday and as I make these notes so I can write about this later, which is now, my actions, which I believed to be noble, right, justified, and brave at the time, are ever so slightly tempered with the stink of the following realities, which until this point had not crossed my mind:
I could have checked the hood for the latent heat that would confirm my suspicion about the recency of Volvo owner's arrival.
I was in the short-term parking garage, which would speak to a picker-upper as opposed to a traveler going on a trip long enough to drain the battery to death by the time they returned.
Modern cars, and this beautiful example of a Volvo wagon was off-the-lot smelly of new car, so as never to be mistaken for anything but modern, at least for the next half-decade or so, always have a loud and annoying (by design) chime that sounds when you open the door with the lights on full-on-drain-my-battery-mode to let you know you've left the lights on full-on-drain-my-battery-mode and that you opening the door signifies that you most likely forgot that you left the lights on full-on-drain-my-battery-mode and are now attempting to erroneously depart without taking the proper do-not-drain-my-battery precautions.
In the light of this new evidence vis-Ã -vis the probability that the lights of this fresh, beautiful, positively modern Volvo being left on would likely not cause the owner and fellow family members and/or affluent probably-horse-farm-owning close friends being picked up from the Philadelphia International Airport any duress at all, and in reality might afford them diminished visibility in the heavy squall they found themselves in on the way home to said horse farm since they would have no way of knowing someone had well-meaningly but somewhat unlawfully breached their car's fortress and turned OFF the automatic safety lighting system Volvo spent (probably) $764,833 developing, I have come to the conclusion that I am not the hero of this story. I am the villain.
Lock your doors, people.