We wondered why Victor Price didn’t have anything better to do. How much time did he spend listening to us each day when he could have been fishing? Maybe he could have been inventing something useful. I don’t think we said anything that would interest anyone else. It must have been boring. Bill says he doesn’t really care that he was overhearing us. But it bothers me. If I said anything that I wanted our neighbor to hear, I would have gone out, knocked on his door, and told him myself. Now I feel like going over there and giving him a piece of my mind, but I guess the water’s already passed under that bridge.
Police and detectives bought Price’s device. Didn’t they bother to ask him how he tested it, or whether he was using it? Don’t we have a privacy law? Shouldn’t people need a license or judge’s order to plant a bug in someone’s home? Why wouldn’t it be the same for remote listening devices?
Dang it all. We live in a community where anyone’s business is everyone’s business. I mean gossip is the primary activity of many of our wives and pub denizens. Gossip is the main instrument of urban morality. Who’s sleeping with whom. Who lost his or her job and for sleeping with someone. What the pharmacist does in his spare time. Why so-and-so was denied membership in the club. It goes on and on. However full people fill their lives with television dramas, there’s still room to think that the same kind of puerile entertainment should be squeezed from the dry turnips of the lives of our hum-drum neighbors.
Maybe it wasn’t much of a leap for Mr. Price to think it was OK to listen in on his neighbors’ private moments.
Monologues