FIRST PROBLEM:

You’re walking alone on a dark downtown street. It’s late.

This is a timed exercise. Get it right, you get nothing. Don’t get it wrong.

Halfway up the block you see a couple getting robbed across the street and twenty meters up. The thief is alone, scraggly, a glue-sniffer or crackhead. He menaces his victims with a long piece of broken glass held high over his head.

The girl, she cries. The guy panics and forks over something from his pocket. The thief spins drunkenly on his heel and runs in your direction. The couple huddle away in the opposite direction, the girl’s hand over her mouth.

The thief is fucked up. He’s looking past you as he approaches, wobbly but aggressive. He gets a car width away and notices your face and pauses, but he’s already committed to demanding all your valuables. He also holds the piece of glass high over his head, angling down in a theatrically menacing gesture. You notice he has a piece of cloth wrapped around the glass to keep from cutting his own hand. It might not be enough to keep from injuring himself if he stabs, but probably good enough if he slices, so while the guy may not be a pro, the glass isn't strictly for show.

In your pockets, you have: a handful of change, a wad of bills, a small folding knife, and a canister of pepper spray.

You:

You have three seconds to come up with a plan.
 

SECOND PROBLEM:

Your street is hundreds of years old. The buildings are older than electricity, and along and between all the buildings are miles and miles of cables and wires. Rather than retrofit wiring in a sensible manner, generations of people have haphazardly hung wire under eaves in thick messy bundles, down walls in single lines for no apparent reason, and dangled in unsightly criss-crosses in every direction. You  can assume all of them had a purpose at one time, but these days, who knows how many are actually carrying any kind of current. You just hope none of them are your electricity, phone, alarm, or doorbell.

One night, while walking on the street, you heard what sounded like firecrackers. Across the street at knee level, an apparently completely solid masonry wall was sparking in a rough line. The wiring inside the wall was shorting out enough to throw bright sparks through the paint with loud bangs as it went. Upon inspection, the wall was completely smooth and solidly painted, except for a few very faint scorch marks. Wiring is nearly supernatural in this country.

Late at night you can sit in your third-floor window and watch the thieves at work, usually alone, but sometimes with a lookout. They scale walls with some skill and grab any piece of wire they can and pull. Whatever lengths they break off get stuffed into a plastic garbage bag, which they take to the junkie’s district to sell for copper. If they see anyone coming up the street, they jump down and curl against a wall and pretend to be asleep, just another passed-out homeless person for the police to ignore.

Some nights you’ll hear a strange noise outside and see a guy hanging off a wall at a daring angle, pulling as hard as he can on an overhead wire. He may be out there for quite some time, making a stupid racket at 3AM. You’ve even seen them Tarzan off the walls, trying to rip out the wires. It’s an urban jungle, all right.

The Platypus Hostel has one main building and two sub-buildings, one several doors up and one a few doors down and across the street. In order to connect the other two with wireless internet, a local engineer had erected, at considerable expense, a rather sizeable antenna on the roof of the main building and a powerful wi-fi repeater. Naturally, the system never worked. An Australian geek staying in one of the sub-buildings took it on himself to wire it up with a cable. He carefully strung seventy-five meters of the highest-grade Cat5 he could find high among the gutters, mixing in with the other old bundles of wire. "Oh, I know the weather will degrade it," he said, "but I only need it to work for a few months." He was surprised when it disappeared a few nights later. If you leave a lightbulb screwed in overnight, 15 feet off the ground, don't count on it being there in the morning. These guys are as ambitious as they are aggravating.

You come home one night, a little drunk, and you hear a strange noise outside. You have to take a leak anyway, so you jokingly tell your friend on the internet chat: hold on, I have to go pee on a cable thief outside my window.

When you look out the window, there’s a guy climbing the wall two stories down, grabbing at wires, smack dab precisely underneath your open window. It is a windless night.

You:



THIRD PROBLEM:

You are walking into an office building with a security desk in the lobby. As well as the guard behind the desk, the door to the elevators is manned by a security guard. There are a few other people coming and going.

In order to get inside this building, visitors are required to leave a photo ID at the security desk and receive a visitor pass in exchange. You have forgotten your ID.

Sometimes, security is tight. The Israeli embassy, for an obvious example, brooks no bullshit. And even as an American, just try to get into the US embassy without an appointment – usually the only way to manage this trick is to wave your blue passport at the Colombian guards, insult their mothers in the most egregious fashion possible, and tell them you’ll call someone with real authority if they don’t open the gate for you right the fuck now. You may not want to be an ugly American, but they won’t back down until you are.

Other places, security might be a little looser, and being a foreigner may work in your favor. You expect this is one of those buildings where security is not exactly top-shelf.

You:


 
FOURTH PROBLEM:

There’s a mugger working your corner most nights of the week. He’s maybe twenty years old and scruffy, with a distinct disjointed way of walking.

The first time you see him, he approaches aggressively, but not exactly threatening. He doesn’t seem put off by the fuck-off look that stops most. In fact, he seems a little stoned. He tries to reach into your jacket pocket, but you swat his hand away and tell him to fuck off like you can’t even be bothered to beat him. He offers to walk you home and tags along for the remaining half-block to your door. He seems friendly and just happy to talk, but there’s an underlying menace that needs to be handled.

At the door, you grab him by the collar, put your finger in his face and explain to him if he ever tries to pull anything on you it will not end well, and things will go better if everyone stays friendly. He seems sincere in his agreement and wishes you good night with a wave.

You don’t see him again for quite some time, but when you do, you recognize the odd gait from a block away. You pull out your pocket knife and curl it point down in your fist, the blade hidden under your sleeve. When he approaches to ask for a little money, you tell him it’s a bad idea, but the kid won’t listen and he tags along again, aggressively and obnoxiously. You can’t be certain he’s actually the violent type, but he’s definitely unstable. You scratch your nose with the back of your hand, displaying the blade. He stops in his tracks, but he can’t resist calling out, hey, if you won’t give me money, will you give me your knife?

You turn around and tell him with a smile no, but if he wants it, he should come closer. He laughs cheerfully and runs off.  

You see him a few times after that, but he seems to recognize you now. He’ll walk up within ten meters and take a look, but he won’t come closer.

One night you watch him from your window. He works the street carefully, hitting up people for change. He ignores single women, but he’ll approach a couple or single men. He slinks into a corner and smokes crack and becomes a little bolder. He approaches one couple who deny him, but he senses something in the man’s demeanor, a bit of weakness. You can see it from three floors up – the guy startles. The kid tags along with them for half a block, looking all around spastically, until he decides the coast is clear and he pulls out a piece of broken glass and demands money. The guy hands it over and the kid runs off.

He works again the next night. He loiters around the intersection looking for just the right target. He lets dozens of people pass by unmolested, not even asking for change. He stalks the pavement for a half hour before what he wants comes walking: two foreign guys, tall, blond and oblivious. He moves with surprising speed, showing them a piece of broken glass. The guys are surprised and fork over their money without a thought, and the kid runs away.

A few nights later, the kid approaches you fast from behind, but when you turn around, he recognizes your face and slows down.

“I know you,” he says.

“Yeah, and I know you,” you say. “I’ve seen you robbing people on my street, and I’m not happy with you.”

The kid keeps trailing along.

You:

 

BONUS PROBLEM:

Georgian jazz combo, 1969. Hippest thing a bunch of commies ever did, or hippest thing anybody ever did, ever?


Pencils down! Let's see how you did...


FIRST PROBLEM: None of the answers are especially good, are they? Try this: tell the mugger be cool, brother. I don’t have much, but I’ll share it with you. Take some coins out of your pocket and when you go to hand them over, fumble and drop them on the ground. Say oops and keep walking. He’ll scramble for the change and figure it’s all he’ll get out of you, and by the time he finds all the coins, you’ll be gone and he’ll have forgotten you. This is probably the closest thing to a win-win resolution. You get to feel clever for neatly sidestepping the issue, and he gets a few pennies closer to his next hit of glue. Everyone’s happy, no one gets hurt.

A case might be made for violence, if you want to play Batman. But where do you stop with this? If the purpose is to incapacitate the bad guy, well, smacking him up won’t keep him from doing the same thing tomorrow. The criminal justice system won’t work here. You could cripple him to prevent him from attacking other people, but if you’re going that far, why not just kill him?

The paramilitaries arrived in La Candelaria to do just that. A few guys dressed all in black on motorcycles, patrolling the streets… if they decide you’re a bad guy, good night. I first heard of this from a friend of mine, a Colombian adoptee raised in the US. He’s American, but he looks local. He told me about an “undercover cop” stopping him in the street one night and yelling at him to get home quick. It didn’t make sense to me, but then I heard the paras were in town and I thought my friend was pretty lucky. If they didn’t like how he looked, they might’ve taken him for a long walk just for being on the street at night. You wanna follow the paramilitary example? Really?

Actually, the best answer to this problem, for normal people, would be to turn around and run the opposite direction as soon as you see the guy robbing the couple up the street. But for people like us, where's the fun in that?

SECOND PROBLEM: Yeah, I know it’s gross, but the universe gave you a full bladder and put the jackass directly under your window for a reason.

THIRD PROBLEM: Neither answer is correct. The correct answer is, walk into the building like you own it and have places to go. Don’t even look at the security desk. It doesn’t exist for people like you. Nine times out of ten, you can walk right by the line of people waiting to exchange their IDs and visitor passes and the security guard will even open the door for you. It’s a little spooky how well this actually works, and worst-case scenario, you’re back at option 1 anyway.

FOURTH PROBLEM: All the answers would probably work to one degree or another, but an even better answer is to tell him you’ve seen him working your street and you’re unhappy with him, and does he know what you do to thieves on your street? You… tickle them! And then lunge for him and tickle his ribs. This will spook the living shit out of him and every time he sees you in the future he’ll run straight the hell away from you, you fucking freakshow.

BONUS PROBLEM: Are you kidding me? Look at the guy in the red shirt turn on his bandmate at about 1:16! These guys were tight! If the rest of the Soviet Union was this hip, they'd still be around.


SCORE YOURSELF: If you maintained any portion of your sanity whatsoever, reward yourself with a belt of whiskey, champ.