Being at FOSDEM 20013 Peter from Neo4j asked my if I would like to get a neo4j shirt send to my home adress. We have to keep in mind that i just moved back to Koblenz from China. I did not only move to Koblenz but I moved to Koblenz Lützel. I knew from my collegues that this part of Koblenz is supposed to be like the Harlem of NYC. But I found a really nice flat where I leave together with 3 other nice students. Even though I was skeptical looking at that flat I had to move there after I met my future roommates.
A couple of weeks after moving in I realized that I smelled pod more and more frequently from the streets. Especially from people smoking it in front of my front door. I had even observed people exchanging packages in the backyard of our house. Of course I cannot say for sure but even at the time of seeing this I was pretty confident that they would deal drugs. Over the last couple weeks we had several problems in our house.
- People broke in our basement and stole some stuff
- Another time people broke in our basement and stored bikes there which did not belong to any of our neighbors.
- There is a hole from a gun in our front door.
- last but not least: I was about to leave our backyard when I saw a guy wearing my neo4j shirt.
Ok let me elaborate on the last one:
Neo4j the graph database is not known as the most famous fashion brand in the world. So I hardly recognized the shirt when I saw him wear it. But I somehow recognized the design of the shirts and decided to turn around in order to get a second look at the shirt. Who in my neighborhood would wear such a shirt and what connection would he have to this rather new piece of technology?
When i turned around things got even stranger. I saw the back of the guy and his shirt said:
“My stream is faster than yours” which certainly is a link to graphity
and also displayed the Cypher Query:
“(renepickhardt) <-[:cites]- (peter)”
I was so perplex that I didn’t realize that I was alone and the guy was standing there with 2 other men. I said: “Sorry, you are wearing my shirt!” And his friends came in and told my I was crazy and how I could come up with this idea. I insisted that my name was written on the shirt. In particular my full name! Especially I knew the quote which was exactly what Peter had planned to print on my shirt.
The guys started mocking me and telling me to f… off. But I somehow resisted and pointed out again that this was certainly my shirt. At that moment the door of the Kung Fu School opened and the coach Mr. Lai came out and asked if the guys again stole packages from our post box. At that moment the guy with my shirt had to turn around again so anybody could see my name. He stared telling me some weird lie about how he got this shirt as a present and just thought it was nice looking but he finally returned it to me.
Most interestingly the police didn’t care. The policeman only said: “It’s your own fault when you move to a place like Koblenz Lützel.” I find this to be very disappointing. I always thought that our policemen should be objective and neutral. Stealing and opening other peoples mail is a crime in Germany. Also owning drugs or stealing bikes… It is said that the police refuses to help us with our situation.
Well anyway If you have an important message for me why don’t you use email rather than physical mail. My email is also potentially read by third parties but at least it is still safely delivered. Anyway big thanks to the guys from neo4j for my new shirt (: