Times when taking the moral high ground doesn't feel so good

BY JOE BENNETT

OPINION: Here's one for the moralists out there. I can't see that I did anything wrong but now I wish I'd done nothing.

My letterbox is a milk churn. I don't much like it, but I have never disliked it enough to spend money - which I do like - replacing it. My letterbox serves.

Or at least it served until a few weeks ago when I came home to find it leaning at an angle that would have brought a gust of homesickness to any passing Pisan. I stopped the car. This was just as well because lying round the corner in my drive was a big rock. The rock had been dislodged from behind the letterbox. In the mud nearby lay a letter from the bank.

My first thought was vandals. But it would take a remarkably committed vandal to climb to my house, and if he were that committed I suspect that he would commemorate his visit with something more drastic than a damaged letterbox.

Closer inspection revealed that the stand supporting the letterbox had been staved in and then hauled roughly back into shape. The door on the side of the letter box hung open. I tried to close it, but it was buckled.

I was performing delicate surgery on the letterbox door with a mallet, when the neighbour rang. Had I noticed what had happened to my letterbox, she asked.

"Aha," I said.

She said that she had seen a truck reverse into it that morning. One of the men on board had got out, propped the letterbox back up and then they'd driven away. It had happened too swiftly for her to act, but she had noted down the phone number on the side of the truck.

"Thank you," I said, and with vindictive glee I dialled the number. It's not every day that you get the chance of being utterly in the right.

The woman from the trucking company confirmed that one of their trucks had indeed been up my way that morning. She would pass the matter on and I would hear from them shortly.

At which point I felt a shift in my own attitude.

"Look," I said, "I don't want to make it into a federal issue. I realise that these things happen. And if your man had only bothered to pick up the fallen mail, remove the rock from the drive and perhaps leave a note of apology in the letterbox, I'd probably have let the matter go. But he didn't."

It was a reasonable thing to say. And the woman on the phone agreed that it was a reasonable thing to say. But to my own ears it didn't sound reasonable. It sounded like a self- justifying whine.

Four days later I had not heard back. I considered letting the matter drop. The repairs needed were minor and I could readily effect them myself. But at the same time, the failure to contact me felt like a snook being cocked for the second time. I rang again. The woman said she was sorry that I hadn't heard from anyone and she would chase the matter up once again.

That was two weeks ago. Every morning when I fetched the mail and I had to force the door on the letterbox shut, I was reminded that the company still hadn't rung me and I felt irritated. So this morning I decided to put an end to the irritation and draw a line under the whole trivial matter. I rang once more, reminded the woman of what had happened, said that I was disappointed they hadn't got back to me but no doubt they were busy people trying to make a living in a tough economic world, and anyway, I was ringing to say forget it. I couldn't be bothered to pursue the matter any further. Incident over, no hard feelings, let's move on.

"We sacked him," said the woman.

"You what?" I said.

She said that this wasn't the first incident of the kind that they'd had with this worker. My letterbox had been the last straw and the boss had sacked him.

"But," I said, and then I could think of nothing else to say. Objectively I had had every right to do what I did, but that's not what my conscience was saying. The conscience operates by different rules. Where it gets those rules from I don't know, but mine insists on whispering into my ear the cruellest of schoolboy jibes. "Snitch," it keeps saying. "Snitch."

Though I realise now that had I been brought up differently it would be whispering about the wisdom of turning cheeks.

- © Fairfax NZ News