Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

Why… yes… actually…

I saw this flier on the corner of 23rd Street and Sixth Avenue and all the little tear off phone numbers at the bottom had been torn off! I think it was for aroma therapy or something dumb. Since there was a little tiny bit of chill in the air, I thought I’d walk around a bit and do some errands tonight. I hung around Barnes and Noble for a while looking at books about After Effects. Pretty dry stuff, I promise. I guess I was delaying going to Old Navy. About a month ago, I bought some pants for Jeremy that were on sale. The cashier left the little plastic theft-guard tag on them. I’ve tried to pry them off with a variety of tools lying around the house with no success. And of course I lost the receipt. Earlier today I was joking that taking the pants back to the store was going to result in some kind of George Costanza style debacle and was told that I was just paranoid. So I saunter into Old Navy and there’s a small line. I wait for a bit, a little nervous that I couldn’t walk right up to an idle cashier and she could see me coming in and taking out the pants from my back pack. When it’s my turn, I explain what happened and take the Old Navy bag out of my back pack.
And she’s all like, “You got a receipt?”
And me, trying to seem like, oh-these-things-happen explain that alas I do not. And then things get really ugly.
Then I’m instantly being accused of stealing these pants. It was really strange. I said, “But you saw me walk in!” I made a big point of making eye-contact with her when I walked inside. She said she did not. It quickly escalated to Costanza status and I was accused of having an attitude and me threatening to rip the pants in two if they didn’t remove the security tag (in retrospect, I really doubt I’m that strong). Ultimately, a manager came along, though the cashier and I were both trying to tell her two different versions of my story over each other. I walked over to some machine, where the tag was removed. Then I turned around to make a mean face at the cashier and she was gone. Was she ever there??? I split, swearing never to be wooed by affordable cargo pants again.