!!!!!!!!!! Crime and punishment

This is certainly drivel.

Many years ago I was working with a juvenile who got into trouble with the legal system.  He had a problem; he loved to break glass. You know …like the windows on your car…or the windows on your house.   Oddly, although I thought the kid had a lot of positive attributes, many of his victims wanted him dead …..and dead through exceptionally painful methods.  I saw positives because the only crimes he had ever committed involved breaking glass.

Anyway, one of my employees had an epiphany.  He landed the kid a job at a recycling center…running the glass crusher.   Thankfully, the judge thought it was brilliant, because in this state there are laws about minors running machinery.  The judge addressed the legal issues, and the kid was “sentenced” to operate the glass crusher under supervision.  The kid thought he had gone to heaven.

Of course, he has a few years on him now. I just checked up on him.  He has no legal issues on record and runs a small company.

When I was a kid I had a friend who my parents highly disapproved of.

In fact, most people disapproved of him. He was foreign for a start. And a bit of a rebel, to put it mildly. He was always playing with matches and attempting to blow things up.

I lost track of him after the age of about eleven and we recently managed to find each other again via facebook.  I was exceedingly nervous asking how his life had been. I needn't have worried. He's the absolute epitome of the problem becoming the solution and he's recently retired from a highly successful career in bomb disposal. And, you guessed it, a lot of that disposal involved gathering all the bombs together and blowing them all up at once!

He wrote a book about it too - The Trash Men of War