The next day, code enforcement knocked on my door. He had called. The guy said, “I’m not sure why I’m here. I see no weeds. You have a nice home. Can you show me where he thinks these weeds are?” So we went to the side of the house. Code enforcement saw his fence blocking my access. “Well, nothing I can do to you. But he has ten days to remove that fence. He also needs to weed his patio and edge the sidewalk.” The next morning, his wife came over and asked if I would split the cost of removing the fence. I said, sorry, but we are out of charity money this week. Now there is an old man sweating in the heat, removing the fence, and I can hear him calling his kids to come help, because their old man could not keep his mouth shut. He could at least have tolerated someone on that grass to make it look nice. He did not. Tomorrow, now that I have access, I am removing those roses and putting them somewhere I can enjoy them. The mulch will come up. I will lay landscaping plastic and cover the whole thing in pea gravel. You want to be difficult? Fine. Look at the side of my house.
The last one is a smaller piece of malicious compliance, and it is titled, well, that is the seasoning you asked for. My dad and I love to cook, so we tend to have a good variety of ingredients, especially herbs and spices. When I was in middle school, we discovered garlic powder, and we used it on almost everything it could possibly taste good on. To my annoyance, my mom insisted on calling it garlic salt, even after I explained several times that that is a different seasoning. Finally I had my dad pick up a shaker of actual garlic salt, and I waited. Eventually my mom asked me to bring her the salt, the pepper, and the garlic salt for whatever she was eating. So I did just that. When she inevitably asked why her food was so salty, I explained that I had brought her exactly what she asked for. Salt, pepper, and garlic salt. She never called it garlic salt again. I felt very satisfied with my smart-aleck answer.
The thread that runs through all three is the same. People invent authority they do not have, and then they are shocked when the actual rules show up. Doris thought a treasurer’s title was a badge. The neighbor thought a fence made a strip of someone else’s grass his. My mom thought a word meant whatever she had decided it meant. In each case the correction was simple. Leave the yard. Move the fence. Use the seasoning you named. The people who would not do the simple thing were the ones who ended up explaining themselves to a cop, a code officer, or a very salty plate of dinner. Kids are allowed to hunt eggs. A homeowner is allowed to access his own side yard. Garlic powder is not garlic salt. None of that should require a siren. Sometimes it does, and when it does, the person who called is not always the person who gets to leave.