Busting Potential Theives!

I started work at my usual time of 1:30 this afternoon. Sigourney was working the morning shift and finished at 3:30 after I got back from my break. Anyway, everything seemed like a usual Sunday afternoon at work – pretty quiet probably since it was after the first week back at school for most people. However, just after 4pm I got a visit from a few suspicious-looking youngsters who showed up in a mob of around five or six. From the moment they walked in, there was something amiss about the way they looked. A few of them were wearing backpacks that were obviously empty – a telling sign that they might be up to no good. It was time for friendly Aonghas to put his detective hat on.

Since there were no other customers at the time, I was entirely focused on the teens sifting their way through the store. A few minutes later one of the young lads (who we’ll call Joseph from now on for convenience sake) comes up to me and asks if he can try on the black skinny jeans he’s holding. I say sure and open one of the changing rooms for him. Seconds later, his mate (who we’ll call Frank) asks me the same question, holding the same style of black skinny jeans. “Fair enough,” I thought to myself and let him into the adjacent changing room. So that was okay. While Joseph and Frank were trying on the skinny jeans, the other groupies were lingering around by the changing rooms and I was standing a few metres away, spying on their every move.

Hoping that maybe other customers would draw my attention away, the group continued to gaze around the store absent-minded until one of the mates (who we’ll call Charlie) walked over to the skinny jeans and took another pair off the rack. On closer inspection, I could see that there were in fact two pairs of jeans he was carting back to the changing room, though he was trying his best to make it look like it was just the single pair. Charlie put the jeans over Joseph’s door and I made a mental note that Joseph now had three pairs of jeans in his changing room. Charlie headed back to the jeans rack and took yet ANOTHER pair of jeans off the same rack and this time put them over Frank’s changing room door. At first I gave them the benefit of the doubt – perhaps Joseph just really couldn’t decide what size he was in girls’ skinnys. But what Charlie did next pushed it too far, and I knew then it was time to step in…

Alongside our changing rooms we have a column of hooks that have numbered tags 1 through to 6. When someone wants to try on some clothes, we are supposed to take note of how many items of clothing they have and hang the tag with that number outside their door. Now Charlie must have seen the tags hanging nextdoor and he thought he’d be crafty by taking a ’1′ tag and hanging it on Frank’s door. I knew that Frank had two pairs of jeans so I stepped in and said, “eh, doesn’t that guy have two pairs of jeans in there?” Charlie stared at me, obviously trying to think of an excuse on the spot and said, “uhh, ohh umm…” and I said “yeah, that guy has two pairs and your other mate in the other changing room has three!” He knew I was on to them by now, so when Joseph came out holding his three pairs of jeans I asked him how they fitted and he told me that they were all too tight. He passed the jeans to Charlie and then Charlie said,

“oh farr oi, I got you 2 pairs of the same size ow!”

I find it ironic that that two pairs were the same size yet Joseph didn’t seem to realise because they were all too tight. Hmmm. The mob started to move out of the store, and I made sure they put the jeans back. But Frank, the guy with the two pairs, was still in the changing room, perhaps trying to conjure up a scheme to get the jeans past me. When he finally opened the door, I was standing there looking straight at him. He knew there was nothing else he could do so he walked past me and put the two pairs back on the rack and scurried out to join his mates who had left the store by this time. After he left I went to the rack of jeans and noticed the two pairs he put back were ALSO the same size… Grrr.

Part of me feels satisfied that I managed to prevent a theft from happening, but at the same time I’m a little annoyed that I couldn’t do anything else about it. I just hope that they don’t recognise me in future when I’m walking home from work at night, or else I’ll have to pull out my kung-fu if they try anything funky on me.