When your house does not appear in Google's Street View, allowing the whole world to see your son's car leaking oil on the street frontage, the weeds obscuring your shabby letterbox, and any of your other sins, it is hard not to feel alone and unloved.
Like a pariah, I have been cast to the edges of the global village and I am hurt.
Don't the big brothers at Google know what an enthusiast I am for their intrusive technology?Forget Christmas.
I'm counting the sleeps to the time when my every move can be captured on closed circuit television and beamed into every home where a computer is lurking.
I know the feeling that will come from belonging to the global village will keep me on the straight and narrow.
It is only the possibility of being stopped at a checkpoint or zapped by a speed camera that stops any of us driving drunk and speeding, after all.
When we live in places where there are no frightening old biddies twitching the net curtains and embarrassing us by telling our friends and neighbours of our dastardly deeds, we have no need to behave well.
Now CCTV is being suggested for the Octagon I realise my days for behaving badly there may be limited.
Should I have one first fling, accosting and insulting strangers, vomiting over someone's shoes, or spray painting passersby?
It won't be particularly rewarding if it can't be endlessly run on YouTube so all my friends and my children's friends can see how cool I really am.
Has anyone considered that while these cameras might raise the standard of dress and behaviour in the central city, those who might be tempted to thuggery will merely go elsewhere, or will police, like me, think that if something cannot be seen it does not exist?
While we wait for more cameras, there is a need for more practical action from the citizenry.
Spurred on by a recent account of what sounded like an unprovoked assault, serious enough to result in a couple of black eyes, of an 18-year-old walking home with friends in the early hours after a school leavers' dinner, I am forming a group called the Mavi (rhymes with navy).
It stands for Mothers Against Violent Idiots. (I know that sounds a little judgemental, but just think of it as jurisimprudence).
The victim of the aforementioned assault was not prepared to go to the police, even though the unknown assailant could easily have been identified with basic detective work.
His reason for not doing so was he felt the person would get off with a warning as it might be a first offence and then the offender would get his mates to do a really good job of beating him up.
He could not be persuaded by my argument he could not know the outcome of a police investigation and that by not doing anything he was encouraging this to happen again, and next time it might be more serious.
Mavi will not wait for anyone to complain.
We will tour the mean streets (wearing masks so as not to embarrass our offspring) in the early hours in unmarked old-lady cars, bearing baskets of home baking which we will use to lure wannabe offenders.
This may sound a little seedy, but be assured our selection procedures will eliminate mothers out for a bit of rough or a toy boy.
Sensible shoes and full length pinnies will be our uniform.
Once we have the wayward safely inside (making full use of the child-locks on the doors), when their mouths are full of scone or muffin, we will talk at them.
It may sound a little unfeeling, unmotherly even, but we won't care about how tough life may have been for them and whether they were breastfed or not.
We will talk about our children - our hopes and dreams and fears for them.
We may shock them by showing them our stretch marks and varicose veins, explaining, ever so gently, we do not take these badges of motherhood lightly and neither should they.
The only time we will encourage them to speak is when we ask what their mums might feel about their behaviour.
While they are thinking we will play them music we know they will hate - anything country and western, maybe some old Bob Dylan, even a little Randy Newman.
We will sing our own song With the Mavi (to the tune of In the Navy) and get them to learn the movements which go with it.
Then we will deliver them safely home.
Such torture will not encourage recidivism.
Since the Mavi may appear to impinge on a few rights, I am asking John Key to push through enabling legislation under urgency - before the end of the year.
If he hesitates, I'll assure him it could make him more popular than Santa.
Mothers know best.
- Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
