▸ Column · Modern grounded comic — a vigilante crew's storm-drain hideout, where the communal cold-box and the quartermaster's requisition desk stand in for the office fridge and Accounts Payable.
LEONARDO replies.
The letter
For three weeks running, someone in the crew's shared hideout has been raiding the cold-box and eating my rations, and I'm 94% sure it's the quartermaster — call him "Gerald" — because he keeps dropping suspiciously expert notes, like "whoever cured that jerky really understood the salt-to-smoke ratio," which is not a thing an innocent man says. I've tried passive-aggressive notes, a decoy meal spiked with the hottest sauce we own (Gerald did not flinch, which is worse than if he had), and a lunch sack labeled "MEDICAL — DO NOT TOUCH." Thefts continue. My real problem: I can't confront Gerald, because Gerald decides whether my gear-and-expense requisitions clear in three days or three months — and I have a stack of very generously padded "patrol supply" claims pending. Is there an honest way through this that doesn't end in me going hungry or quietly losing a fortune in reimbursements?
Leonardo replies
Before anything else: nobody holds a cold-box, a stack of requisitions, and a guilty conscience all at once and gets to call it a strategy. So let me pull apart what's happening from what you're actually afraid of. You are not at war over jerky. You are at war over a pile of "patrol supply" claims you'd rather nobody read closely — and as long as that's true, Gerald owns you whether he ever touches your rations again or not. That's the line you're really defending, and you picked the soup so you wouldn't have to look at it.
Down in our place, Mikey raids the fridge like it's a personal campaign against me specifically. I never once won that with a note. I won the day I stopped pretending the food was the issue and just said it plainly: "That was mine. I needed it." No trap, no decoy, no hot-sauce ambush — that last one isn't cleverness, it's control in a costume, and it costs you the one thing you can't spare here, which is your nerve.
So here's the discipline, and I won't pretend it's free: square the requisitions first. Make the leverage worthless. Then you walk up to Gerald owing no one an explanation and tell him, simply, hands off. The right thing is rarely the easy thing. Do it anyway, and do it on purpose.
— Leonardo
Raphael weighs in
Leo, you walked the whole way around the actual thing and planted a flag next to it. Listen, tough guy — you wanna know why one stolen meal has you rigging hot-sauce booby traps? It ain't the meal. It's that you're sitting on a stack of cooked-up claims and some honest part of you already knows it. You're not furious at Gerald. You're furious you handed the guy the keys to your own bluff. Same crime he's pulling, just a bigger portion. Drop the spy games — that's revenge too scared to say its name. Burn the fake paperwork, not the man's tongue. Then go eat like somebody with nothing to hide.
— Raphael
▸ Read next