Monday Morons--People Who Steal

The first week or so that I worked at the Halloween Store last October, I found a ring on the floor of the ladies room. Not like someone's engagement ring or something like that, but one of the skull rings that we sold at the store. Seemed like it must have fallen out of someone's pocket while she was in the stall. Seemed obvious to me that someone had stolen the ring. And, since we had just opened, and we try to hide the restrooms from the customers (because we don't have a maintenance crew to clean them), it was probably one of the employees that stole the ring.

So that was kind of a dumb thing to do. And the really bad thing is not only did an employee probably do it, but since it was the first week it was mostly returning employees from last season. Probably the thief was someone we already knew and thought we could trust.

Not that you really know a person from working with them a month or two once a year, but it still seemed bad to me.

Anyway, it is bad to steal anything, but it seems particularly stupid to steal some things. If someone got caught stealing this silly ring from the Halloween Store, in theory the police would be called and they could go to jail. If you really wanted a ring, why not just buy one for six dollars? If you didn't really want that ring, why risk going to jail? It just doesn't make a lot of sense.

I did a few things like that when I was a kid. A few times I took something I wanted that I thought no one would miss. I regretted it afterward. I took a few candy bars to see if I would get caught. Both things were wrong and stupid, but I quit doing even stuff like that when I was thirteen.

When I was ten I took stuff from vending machines. It didn't seem the same as stealing from a real person. Hadn't really thought the whole thing through, like someone else would lose their money trying to buy the item I had taken.

I used to work at a movie theater. We we going to get a bit of a remodel. Nothing major, but the bathrooms were being improved. We were going to get the larger toilet paper rolls, but before we could have the toilet paper holders installed they had to make new stalls with real walls instead of those laminated cardboard dividers. The flimsy stalls would hold the small rolls of toilet paper like you use at home just fine, but not the larger rolls that we switched to.

While we were waiting for the stalls to be upgraded, we spent a lot of time going up and down the stairs to get rolls of toilet paper. We just could not seem to replace the toilet paper fast enough. Finely, one of the managers said that we could just leave a whole case of toilet paper in the ladies room. That would be easier than making five trips up the stairs to get paper everyday, and if a stall ran out of paper before we had time to check, maybe one of the customers could just replace a roll.

So we took this huge box of tissue paper and left it in the ladies room. Next to it we left a box of softsoap. The soap dispensers were going to be replaced too, and we'd run out of soap that went in the old dispensers, and rather than buy a lot of soap for the old dispensers that we wouldn't be able to use, we just bought bought a few boxes of hand soap in small bottles like you use at home.

Half the stalls needed toilet paper, but we were called away to do something else before we finished with that. About twenty minutes later, we went back to the ladies rooms to finish replacing the toilet paper and found both the box of hand soap and the huge box of toilet paper empty.

People stole hand soap and toilet paper.

I think if it was a few people stealing a lot of stuff we would have seen. So I think that it was a lot of people just stealing a little bit. I think like a hundred people all went in a took one or two rolls of toilet paper and hid them in their purses or under their coats.

If any of them had been caught, the police would have been called, and they would have been arrested.

Can you imagine the phone calls that their families would get?

Hey, I'm in jail. Can you come and bail me out?

What did you do? What's the charge?

Stealing.

What'd you steal?

Toilet paper.

I mean, it's still wrong, but I could see that a person might be tempted to steal a diamond ring or money. That's something small that you can hide and maybe get away with, and it is worth something. Toilet paper is just the opposite, it is bulky and it isn't worth anything.

Why would anyone steal toilet paper?