I suppose it says something about the times we live in that when it emerged this week that the EgyptAir hijacker wasn't a mass-murdering religious nutso but just a creepy stalkery nutso who misses his ex-wife, so many of us smiled and went "awwww". I doubt it was much fun for the passengers on flight MS181 when Seif Eldin Mustafa stood up with his joke utility belt and pretended he was going to blow them up - except for the dufus Brit who posed for a souvenir pic beside him, grinning like some chump who has spotted Al Pacino eating breakfast and has approached for a selfie and to ask him to say "Hoo-hah!" - but for the rest of us it was a little like the ending of a rom-com, only a hyper-realistic rom-com where the guy storms through airport security to confess his love before she boards the plane and then is brought down by a sniper bullet and Tasered while being dragged off in handcuffs to an undisclosed site for enhanced interrogation.Still though, as the story spread that he did it in hopes of seeing his former wife again, people felt a warm glow at the thought that this wasn't a terror attack but a much older and less predictable and sometimes scarier form of craziness: dudes doing weird things to try make women like them.There isn't a man reading that story who doesn't, if he's honest, have some guilty half-hidden inkling of what was going through Seif Eldin Mustafa's mind. I'm convinced that sequencers will one day isolate that semi-dormant atavistic gene that convinces male human animals that if only we would do something sufficiently socially unproductive and personally reckless, it will instantly make us irresistible to the object of our affections.I once had a girlfriend who felt strongly about the statue of Nelson Mandela in Sandton. She often grew heated on the subject of its lack of verisimilitude. "Why does he look Chinese?" she would demand. "Why does he look like a gondolier who has lost his pole? You spend 27 years in jail and when you come out, that's your thanks?"In the natural course of time we broke up, and late one night, in the company of the kinds of friends who don't necessarily facilitate the formation of good ideas, casting about for a dramatic gesture in order to win her back, I struck upon the genius idea of sawing the statue's head off.Yes! Of course! Why hadn't I thought of this before? I would conceal myself in the shadows like a commando, clutching a collapsible stepladder and a reinforced hacksaw. When the coast was clear, sometime long after midnight, I'd shimmy up the ladder and sit astride his shoulders and press the teeth of the blade to his throat. Then when my ghastly work was done I would lay the severed head in a hessian sack on her doorstep and ring the bell triumphantly. She would answer, bleary-eyed in the small hours of the morning, and behold me there, streaked not in the blood and dust of war but probably in shoe-polish camouflage and sprinkled with aluminium filings. Seeing such a sight, receiving such a tribute, how could she possibly fail to love me?I was saved only by my natural inclination to procrastinate. Over the years procrastination has kept me from many opportunities and achievements, but given the ratio of stupid ideas to good ones that I have on a daily basis, it has probably evened out for the best.Not leaping straight into action bought me enough time to sober up and fully imagine that inevitable moment of being apprehended on Mandela's shoulders, frozen in the spotlight, immortalised in the act of trying to cut off his head. We all have things that we'd prefer didn't show up on a Google search, and I didn't want to spend the rest of my life knowing that new prospective dates would all be tapping in my name to discover the headline, "White man decapitates Mandela!"There was no Twitter in those days but even so I sensed the potential for a mob that might not listen with due care and sympathy as I tried to assure everyone that while I am certainly very sorry for any offence that I may inadvertently have caused, my actions were in no way related to racial enmity. "I'm not a racist!" I imagined pleading, as Madiba's head slowly rolled down the sidewalk with an awkward metallic clank. "You can ask my friends!"We haven't all hijacked a plane, but I think most of us have had that sudden moment of wondering whether it might just work. If society ever wants to be truly safe, it should just lock up all the men...