It’s just past eight o’clock and, with a coffee in hand leaving 10 or 15 minutes later than I’d prefer, I hustle down the stairs with a bounce in my step that probably hides just how tired I actually am. I have gone through the motions of the morning (hit snooze, hit it again, and maybe again once more, wake up, shower, breakfast, iron a shirt, brush my teeth, forget to pack a lunch, walk out and lock the door, unlock to door to check that I turned off the iron, walk out again and lock the door again), and I am finally ready to get a start on the day.

I can see it before I even reach the door. The angle of the mirrors that line one side of the front hallway, remnants of the 1970s architecture that a good real estate agent might say gives this building “character,” reflect my disappointment before I even make it outside.

My newspaper, once again, is gone. When people talk about the banality of evil, this is exactly what they mean.

It doesn’t happen all the time, maybe about once a week, sometimes twice. When I first moved in, there was what you might call a honeymoon period as far as the paper was concerned. I even went out of town on an assignment for three days without canceling my subscription, and when I came home there were three neatly arranged newspapers in a pile in the front hallway waiting for me. I am living somewhere with a sense of neighbourly responsibility, I proudly thought, real community.

But that was then, and in the three months since, I think to myself as I stare at the conspicuously bare sidewalk, the community has gone to shit.

Stealing a newspaper seems to me to be one of the worst things you can do to a complete stranger — a neighbour, no less! — so deliberately taking something that has all the value of a buck and a quarter. The newspaper thief did not order a subscription, and he or she knows this. The heartless thief is fully aware that this rolled up bundle of newsprint, with its news of the day combined with thoughtful commentary on the events that shape our lives (and, on Saturdays, a fashion section), is not theirs. Were there any doubt, a messy squiggle of black magic market ink announces boldly: apt #202. And there is only one person living in apt #202.

I’ve always thought that not taking your neighbour’s newspaper was among the basic standards of human decency, part of a common-sense list that also includes not parking in wheelchair spaces, not putting razor blades in halloween candy and not defecating in public.

I imagine sting operations the way we used to hatch plans to catch Santa. A camera trained on the newspaper, and of course there would need to be another at eye level for a positive identification, and it would probably be heat-activated. I could leave the newspaper in a bear trap or a snare. I could wait outside, casually loitering like I was waiting for someone living inside, and I’d be wearing dark sunglasses, naturally. When the thief walks by and picks up the paper, I would slyly walk over and say something really smooth in a calm, even tone, like, “Newsflash – you’re busted,” or, “This just in — I’ve caught you red-handed,” or maybe I’d just tackle them right there and beat them with the Saturday Globe.

But I will probably do none of these things, and instead simply accept my new reality, a world where such petty thieves are allowed to exist and roam free, albeit with a refreshing knowledge of current events and popular culture. Today they’re stealing newspapers, tomorrow they’re debating the merits of free trade in a post-globalization world. And while they’re at it, they can also go to hell.