bill posters

Estelle is 49, divorced with a daughter living away at college and she lives in the old family home which she inherited from her parents. It's not just the house Estelle loves but the neighborhood in which she grew up - so when the bill posters arrived she saw red!

"I love my house," confides Estelle. "It brings back all the joys of my childhood and it's by no means an empty nest. I adore decorating it and making it a haven from the crazy world outside."

"Of course there have been a lot of changes in the neighborhood since I was a child," laughs Estelle, "but most of them have been positive changes so when a local community group tried to rope me into protesting against a proposed street widening project I wasn't interested."

"I'm reasonably active in community affairs but decided to stay out of this one," says Estelle. "They came up with all sorts of reasons to validate their protest -- many of which were quite reasonable -- but one reason had an emotional slant that I felt was detrimental to their cause and my peace of mind."

"They argued that street widening would endanger the lives of their children. No, not so much endanger, but actually cause their death."

Estelle's belief -- and that of most of her neighbors -- was that the street widening project had more pro than con factors.

And one of the big pros was better safety.

The street was narrow and with cars parked on either side of the road it was virtually impossible for traffic to flow two-way.

"I felt that a far better idea would have been to close the road to vehicular traffic altogether," confides Estelle, "but widening the road by utilizing part of the expansive sidewalk seemed to be the favored solution of the majority and I went along with that quite happily."

"That’s democracy at work, isn't it?" laughs Estelle. "Sometimes governments DO get things right!"

Nevertheless, the protesters had a right to protest and Estelle watched in amusement as they paraded up and down the shopping mall carrying placards and chanting: "What do we want? No road widening. When do we want it? Now!"

Finally, the protest marching stopped and the local residents aggrieved by the road widening project went back to their normal duties. All was quiet.

A few weeks later Estelle was driving into the city one morning and noticed some garish placards tied to street signs, power poles, bus stops and anything that could be used as a vehicle to convey a public message on a main road.

"Oh no," thought Estelle, "it’s those guys again! Well, it was better than all that marching and chanting. Let them be."

However, when the placards started appearing in neighborhood streets Estelle became concerned.

The protesters were behaving in a manner designed to disturb the peace. And when their placard messages started bearing death slogans Estelle thought they had gone over the top.

And then Estelle woke up one morning, looked out her bedroom window, and there it was.

Right outside her place a huge placard with a death slogan had been tied to a power pole.

Had the slogan been less confrontational Estelle might not have minded, but she really objected to a placard with a skull and crossed bones appearing outside her house.

"Right then and there I declared a war on Bill Posters," laughs Estelle. "I examined the plastic-wired ties that the protesters had used to affix the placard to the pole and realized that it would need wire-cutters to break them."

"They must have used a ladder to fix the placard," explains Estelle, "it was way above my head, so if I were to get even with these Bill Posters I needed a plan of action."

Removing the placard was not something that Estelle wanted to do in daylight - and it was not something she could do at night with a torch drawing attention to herself - so she determined that 5am was an appropriate time to do the deed.

At 5am the next day Estelle took ladder and wire cutters to the street. The light was very pale but she had sufficient to see what she was doing.

There was not a soul in sight. It was so quiet you could almost hear a pin drop and Estelle was careful not to make a sound. She climbed up the ladder and just as she was about to cut the first tie a car turned into the street. Estelle panicked.

"It suddenly occurred to me that someone might report me to the police," laughs Estelle. "I had no idea whether the protesters had gained permission to plaster their placards everywhere and if they had gained permission I could have been committing an offence by removing them!"

The car drove on by.

Maybe the driver had not seen her, but Estelle could not imagine how he or she could have missed seeing her up there perched atop the ladder.

Estelle quickly finished the deed, ripped up the placard and placed it and the plastic-wired ties into the garbage bin.

"I felt triumphant," laughs Estelle.

Within a week every one of those placards had been removed from her street.

Estelle wonders if all her neighbors had crept out of their beds at 5am, collected wire cutters and ladders and removed the placards outside their homes with as much vengeance as she did.

"My neighbors, like me, are pretty private people and we don't hang over the fence gossiping," explains Estelle, "so I had no way of knowing how the rest of the placards got removed."

"We acknowlege each other in the street and help each other when needed," explains Estelle, "but minding one's own business was the way my parents brought me up and thankfully that's how my neighbors feel too."

"Protesting about something that the majority agrees with is not only unneighborly but also a waste of time," says Estelle. "If the road widening project proves to be a disaster then I'll be the first to join a protest about it, but until that day -- if it ever occurs -- I intend to make sure that those pesky Bill Posters keep out of my patch!"