“Let’s Not Make a Global Scandal Out of a Hat”

On how a Polish CEO became the world’s most hated man.

Last week the entire world was briefly united in molten, white-hot hatred. This time, the recipient of this rage was Piotrer Szczerek.

Szczerek, a Polish man who needs to buy a vowel, was caught on camera at the US Open taking a cap from the hands of a literal child.

Frankly, the footage is incredible. Szczerek is utterly irredeemable in it.

In the video, tennis player Kamil Majchrzak signs his hat and then hands it to a young boy in the crowd. When Majchrzak is distracted, Szczerek swoops in and wrestles the hat from the hands of the increasingly distressed child. He then slips the pilfered item to his wife who puts it into her handbag. The couple never make eye contact with each other. The whole manoeuvre plays out like a scene from a heist movie.

The internet was a slavering, rabid mess when this footage first emerged. Szczerek was a wonderfully clear-cut villain. But then, to everyone’s enormous delight, the story got even better. Hat thief Szczerek was revealed to be a CEO.

Millions and millions of semi-flacid outrage boners suddenly became hard as diamonds.

This wasn’t a private citizen caught in a moment of madness. This was a CEO. It didn’t matter that he was in charge of a Polish pavement company no one had ever heard of. We had found our wicker man, and he would burn.

The ashes from the last sacrifice — that other CEO, caught having an affair at a Coldplay concert — were still smouldering. But we built a new pyre and fanned the flames anew.

Beautiful words have been spoken by humanity in the face of imminent destruction. But as the sparks started to catch, the Polish CEO had no such poetry.

“I understand some people might not like it, but please, let’s not make a global scandal out of a hat,” he wrote.

And then Szczerek burned like the rest of them. The masses were briefly sated by his total immolation.

I remember another wicker man. This one was Australian.

Back in 2018, residents of a Brisbane apartment block noticed someone had been taking shits on the path leading to their door.

The turds were so frequent that the neighbours formed a coalition to track down the culprit. They surmised that the guilty party was a man who liked to do early morning runs. He went past the block three times a week and, at some point, taking an invigorating dump in the crisp morning air had become part of his routine.

Eventually, someone decided to do a stakeout. They woke up early and snapped a photo of him mid-crap, staring straight into the lens of the camera. He looked like the subject of a nature documentary. His startled face, white from the camera flash, is ingrained in my memory. The photo was taken to the media, and he was dubbed “the Poo Jogger.”

It wasn’t long until his identity was revealed. The Poo Jogger’s name, face, and workplace were printed in newspapers around the country. The damage was immense and irreparable. This story is still the first thing which pops up when you google his name.

“Gone are the gentler days when a person could enjoy a quiet pre-dawn dump next to a stranger's letterbox without the fear of having their face splashed in the paper,” I wrote on Facebook at the time. “Yes, shitting on people's front lawns is bad, but I don’t think publishing photos of the bloke mid-dump in every Australian media outlet is reasonable.”

“Remember he didn’t just do this once. He would regularly shit on the pathway of this unit block,” a friend responded.

Two things can be true at the same time.

There’s something deeply cathartic about righteous anger. To be alive is to constantly encounter tooth-grinding unfairness. Perhaps that’s why it’s satisfying to see someone feel the consequences of their actions. It pleases our lizard brains.

Yes, you shouldn’t steal from a child. You shouldn’t cheat on your wife. You shouldn’t crap on paths that lead to people’s homes. This is objectively poor behaviour that sits outside the social contract most of us abide by.

But what level of public shaming is commensurate with these crimes? A day of global hatred? A week? A month? A year? If you were a judge, what would your sentence be?

“Let’s not make a global scandal out of a hat.”

Szczerek was pilloried for those words. They were astoundingly lacking in contrition. Personally, I couldn’t help but think they held so much truth they were bordering on being profound. I respected his bravery, his candour.

But Szczerek didn’t even write that statement. Someone in the media fell for a Reddit hoax. Those words were reported so much they started to feel like the truth. In reality, Szczerek has since apologised, contacted the boy, and returned the hat.

It’s hard to have sympathy for a person who is caught on camera stealing from a child.

And yet somehow, I do.