When W. S. Gilbert wrote for The Mikado that famous piece of legal philosophy, "let the punishment fit the crime", I don't think he went far enough. For me, beyond that agreeable sense of satisfaction imbued by the taking of an eye for a lie and a tooth for an untruth, there lurks an even more delicious and undiscovered flavour: the hilarious and spontaneous surrealism of making the punishment fit the crime in a bizarre way that can be understood only by the judge.
In my travels on planet Earth I have encountered many people who are, shall we say, socially challenged. In order to exact revenge upon them, I have begun to resort to the above-mentioned 'abstract justice' techniques. It all began one evening when I was driving home and pulled into a petrol station to fill up. A few seconds later, a man pulled up on the other side of the pump (of which there was only one, to be shared by us) and started filling up before I got the chance. I contemplated, for a moment, the fact that his kind were ultimately doomed to extinction in the inevitable world of courtesy and intelligence that must one day appear if humanity doesn't drown in its own poison or light that one last large firework. And then it struck me. I deprecated him. It took but a moment to submit the RFC and establish a consensus, and now he and his kind all walk the planet with a big horizontal stick through their middles: the strikeout font of shame. This is a good thing, and it makes me feel warm and smug (sorry, I mean 'snug').
From there, it was a short journey up the steps of progress; and now I have become the Dredd Judge, meting out Geek Justice wherever I go. Just yesterday, I hoisted up by his hair a noisy night-time reveller who was keeping me awake, and uninstalled his audio drivers: until the next update, he must now communicate in sign language. Last week I decompiled a football thug, amended his code to make him support the rival team and recompiled him - now his friends won't speak to him - ha! And the week before that, upon encountering a lady who seemed determined to disrupt my enjoyment of a film by talking to her companion, I made the rather inspired decision to move her to a virtual server with no network bridge.
Am I insane? Should I be stopped? I'm not sure: all I know is that nobody minds - or indeed, even understands what is happening.
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