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I live in Kitsilano, a busy urban neighborhood in Vancouver, on a street where parking spaces are few and far between and parking enforcement officials detect expired meters in the same way that hungry sharks smell blood in the water. So it’s really no surprise that frustrated drivers often park across my driveway.

Usually there’s enough room so I can squeak my car past the intruders, but last week there was a new and shiny-looking Acura parked more than halfway across the driveway. So I called the City of Vancouver’s parking enforcement line who promptly sent someone over to ticket and tow the Acura. Seriously, I’ve never seen such militant efficiency from a city official.

For about 20 minutes I felt the warm glow of self-righteous, lesson-teaching satisfaction and then forgot all about it. Until early evening, just as it was starting to get dark, when a kid knocked on my door to ask if I knew what had happened to his car. And when I say kid I really mean it. Perhaps 19 at the most, punk-ish clothes but the sort of punk-ish clothes that are brand new and smell of laundry detergent, wide-eyed “first time in the big city” demeanor. Basically the kid looked like that character in a movie of the week who makes one wrong move and finds himself on skid row within hours of hitting the grim metropolis, and to top it all he almost started to cry when I told him his car had been towed.

That’s the trouble with revenge, it’s inevitably something you pursue in the moment of feeling wronged rather than through measured reflection. When people say that revenge is a dish best served cold, they mean that in the heat of the moment your response is invariably hasty and foolish and that it’s far better to plan your retaliatory strike calmly, but I’m not sure I can think of instances where revenge, serious or trivial, is useful at all. In order to punish someone for mildly inconveniencing me (I didn’t even need to use my car that day), I caused this person significant distress and helped the City of Vancouver collect a highly undeserved windfall. My local community and the world at large are no better for my actions.

I sometimes worry that we’re becoming a society that values revenge far too much. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m from the school of thought that sees our justice system as designed in part to protect us from our desire for revenge, not to indulge it under the guise of being “tough on crime”. And a good deal of what makes for a civilized society is about doing things for the common good and taking responsibility for one’s own actions. Large or small, I can’t think of any problems that get solved by causing hurt to others.

So should punk-kid have parked across my driveway? Of course not. But in the scheme of things it was in the bottom 0.001% of serious things that happened in the world last week and my time would have been far better spent on something in the other 99.999%.