Episode 3

After that, he detoured through the guest parking area, where cars could only be left for up to twenty-four hours. Carefully he noted down all the license numbers in the little pad he kept in his jacket pocket, and then compared these to the licenses he had noted down the day before. On occasions when the same license numbers turned up in Ove’s notepad, Ove

would go home and call the Vehicle Licensing Authority to retrieve the vehicle owner’s details, after which he’d call up the latter and inform him that he was a useless bloody imbecile who couldn’t even read signs. Ove didn’t really care who was parked in the guest parking area, of course. But it was a question of principle. If it said twenty-four hours on the sign, that’s how long you were allowed to stay. What would it be like if everyone just parked wherever they liked? It would be chaos. There’d be cars bloody everywhere.

Today, thank goodness, there weren’t any unauthorized cars in the guest parking, and Ove was able to proceed to the next part of his daily inspection: the trash room. Not that it was really his responsibility, mind. He had steadfastly opposed from the very beginning the nonsense steamrollered through by the recently arrived jeep-brigade that household trash “had to be separated.” Having said that, once the decision was made to sort the trash, someone had to ensure that it was actually being done. Not that anyone had asked Ove to do it, but if men like Ove didn’t take the initiative there’d be anarchy.

There’d be bags of trash all over the place.

He kicked the bins a bit, swore, and fished out a jar from the glass recycling, mumbled something about “incompetents” as he unscrewed its metal lid. He dropped the jar back into glass recycling, and the metal lid into the metal recycling bin.

Back when Ove was the chairman of the Residents’ Association, he’d pushed hard to have surveillance cameras installed so they could monitor the trash room and stop people tossing out unauthorized trash. To Ove’s great annoyance, his proposal was voted out. The neighbors felt “slightly uneasy”

about it; plus they felt it would be a headache archiving all the videotapes.

This, in spite of Ove repeatedly arguing that those with “honest intentions”

had nothing to fear from “the truth.”

Two years later, after Ove had been deposed as chairman of the Association (a betrayal Ove subsequently referred to as “the coup d’état”), the question came up again. The new steering group explained snappily to the residents that there was a newfangled camera available, activated by movement sensors, which sent the footage directly to the Internet. With the help of such a camera one could monitor not only the trash room but also the

parking area, thereby preventing vandalism and burglaries. Even better, the video material erased itself automatically after twenty-four hours, thus avoiding any “breaches of the residents’ right to privacy.” A unanimous decision was required to go ahead with the installation. Only one member voted against.

And that was because Ove did not trust the Internet. He accentuated the net even though his wife nagged that you had to put the emphasis on Inter.

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