In town the other day, I was standing at a set of traffic lights waiting to cross the road when I overheard a conversation between two men standing right behind me.
One of the men was fifty-something, unshaven with wispy grey hair and dressed in a shabby fake leather coat. He was telling the other man, who was much younger, how he had hated his time in prison and advising him to avoid it at all costs.
Sage advice, indeed, and naturally it got me wondering what he had done to wind up behind bars.
The lights changed, and we crossed the road together, me walking a pace or two ahead of the others with the grizzled old man talking loudly and openly about life in the can.
He didn’t like the guards, for starters. They were always watching him closely, especially for any signs that he might communicate with other prisoners, which made me think he must have done something exceptionally bad.
And he recalled on one occasion how he was in a lift and several guards insisted on being there as well; they were intimidating and so big he found he could hardly move.
Although he never said exactly what he had served time for, he began saying things that suggested he was some kind of big-time burglar or safe cracker because he was giving advice to his young friend on the type of tools he needed.
Suddenly I was worried. Here I was, apparently eavesdropping on a couple of villains planning the robbery of the century. How long would it be before they noticed that everywhere they went, I went too and that I could hear just about every word they said.
When they paused before crossing the next street, so did I. When they crossed, I followed. And when they turned up a side street, that was exactly the way I was going.
My imagination was running wild, and I saw myself being caught up in a real-life version of one of those thriller stories in which an innocent bystander witnesses a crime, or hears a plot being fomented, and then becomes the target of the criminals.
I was urgently seeking a way to part company with my light-fingered friends when the grey old man eased the tension.
“I once left my spanner outside,” he said, “and you wouldn’t believe the security rigmarole to leave the prison and then come back in. Those guards just kept me waiting as though I wasn’t there. Three hours I had to wait. Three hours just to get a spanner. So, remember, if you ever get that job, be sure to take in everything you need the first time.”
He was not a criminal mastermind after all, but a tradesman who had been called to fix something in the jail. A plumber, perhaps.
A moment later the full truth was revealed when the two men came to their ute parked on the side of the road. On the door was the logo of a well-known lift manufacturer. So that was it, not criminals, nor plumbers but lift maintenance technicians!
Phew! What a relief that was. But even better, the story came with a neat moral: context is everything.