May I help you, Mr. Thief?

I've gotten used to being treated like a common criminal when out shopping. Yeah, it's tedious when the woman at Wal Mart insinuates I'm willing to go to prison for using a stolen credit card to pay for $9 in Cheetoes and Diet Pepsi, but whatever. Just rolls off my back. Most times.

The other day I was running around, scrambling the find supplies for the SF convention this weekend. I was working on 3 hours sleep, had a crapton of stuff to do, and very little time to do it in. So I was in a bad way when I rushed into an office supply store, we'll call them "Moffice Mepo", snatched up a spindle of blank DVDs, and ran back to my car. It wasn't until I got back to the car and was getting the keys out of my pocket that I realized I'd walked out of there without paying the $30 for the blank DVDs. I looked around, expecting a horde of Moffice Mepo workers to be descending upon me to arrest me. All was quiet. Apparently nobody had noticed and there sure as hell hadn't been any alarm going off from the security things they have at the door.

I walked back in to pay for the DVDs. The checkout clerk closest to the door noticed me coming in with them so when it was my turn she asked what was going on. I explained what'd happened and added "You need to turn on your alarm things for dumbasses like me." She giggled at that and explained the blank DVDs were too inexpensive an item to wire with alarms.

I swiped my card. She asked to see it. Thinking she needed the last four numbers of it, I handed it over. She asked for my photo ID.

...

"Excuse me?"

"I need to see your photo ID to check it against your credit card."

This exchange is burned into my memory so here's what I said pretty much word for word. "Okay, so let me get this straight. I'm a criminal mastermind so here's my nefarious plan. I'm going to grab these blank DVDs, stride right out of your store without paying for them, get them all the way to my car without anyone noticing, and then, to cap off my masterpiece criminal scam, I'm going to walk back into the store and risk 10 years in prison by paying for them with a stolen fucking credit card. Yeah. that's right, Lex Luthor's my bitch because I'm the criminal genius! Here, here's my fucking photo ID."

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I lifted a lot of that from a comedy short film I did a few years back that dealt with having to sign the back of your credit card before anyone will let you use it. (my theory is, all signing the back does is let the criminal practice your handwriting over and over until the get it perfect. Whereas, if the criminal had no idea how you sign your name, theirs would be drastically different than yours so it would be obvious what you didn't buy and what the criminal did) So I didn't come up with all that on the spot, but my delivery was pretty good if I do say so myself. And she got pretty red in the face so that made my black heart feel a little better.

Fucking dumbass.