In 2008 I was working in a warehouse as temp staff, and for one week I worked with a scruffy guy about the same age as me. Let’s call him Jason. I was 20, my car was an old Ford that had a tape deck.

Just as any thrifty young man would do in 2008, I bought a 3.5mm-cassette adapter so I could enjoy music from my iPod as I cruised the streets in my automotive antiquity.

I got talking with Jason as we worked, and learned he traveled 100km by train each day for this job. It made total sense to me to offer him a ride to find something for lunch better than the cafeteria located on the site where we worked. That was the window of time when my tape deck adapter disappeared form the car.

Working far from home myself, I didn’t have much of a social life during the week, and had no other passengers for that entire time. Nobody else besides Jason. Why did he feel the need to steal that adapter? Where was the car he imagined using the adapter in? Ok, I admit that when I said ‘scruffy guy’, I really mean he was one of those people who are exactly as dumb as they look. And Jason looked pretty dumb.

Previous to temp work in warehouses, I spent some time working in nightclub security. In the winter of 2009, I was catching up with some old friends at a nightclub where they were doormen. It was a cold Melbourne night, so I said my goodbyes and headed to the car park to make my way home.

As I unlock my car, a hatchback blaring techno music screams into the car park. The passengers pour out, and who else but Jason is there with them, looking just as dumb as I remembered. There was no way that car was playing music through a tape deck adapter. Why, then, did you need to take my adapter, Jason?

I locked my car door and strolled back to the nightclub doors.

‘There’s a group of people about to join the line, that stupid looking one stole something from my car when we worked together last year.’

A moment of confusion ensued, as my former colleague asserted the entire group looked intellectually deficient. I glanced over my shoulder.

‘Oh, right… the stupid one with that stupid goatee.’

I stood facing away from the queue awaiting entry, and overheard Jason’s group literally being told, ‘I don’t like the looks of ya. You’re not coming in here tonight.’

Thanking my friend, I returned to the car. I was ecstatic. I listened to Jason and his friends lament how far from home they had traveled, and how unlikely it was that there was anywhere else they could ‘party’ - this nightclub was a raver-friendly place where people went as much for the drugs as the music.

I don’t recommend seeking revenge. As the saying goes, first dig two graves. But if someone else digs one grave, and your antagonist happens upon it, you don’t have to stop them from falling in.