| Rain Man |
04-12-2008 04:10 PM |
Did you know those anti-theft tags have ink in them?
I didn't. Am I the only one?
I bought a pair of running shoes last week - white, with silver and chartreuse stripes, with blades that shoot out of the toes when you're in a gangfight. Very nice.
I brought them home, and they sat in the closet for a week before my butler pulled them out so the maid in the scanty black maid outfit could put them on me and I could go for a jog. She removed the right one from the box, slid it onto my foot, and tied the laces with her very talented tongue. She then removed the left one out of the box. To my dismay, we discovered that it still had the anti-theft tag on it, and she couldn't get it off with her tongue.
What a pain in the neck. I didn't want to call the pilot and fly the private jet all the way to Paris to return it, and on top of that, my accountant didn't know where the receipt was. It didn't seem like a good idea to walk to a counter with a pair of shoes and no receipt and say, "Hey, these are mine. Would you please remove the anti-theft tag so I can take them?"
So I figured, hey, they're just plastic. Plastic can't survive hammers and backhoes and tools used to develop custom cabinetry. If a beautiful French woman at the finest tennis shoe store in Paris can figure out how to remove them, Edgewood Construction can figure out how to bust it off.
The guy from Edgewood messed with it a little bit, and then decided to take it down to the basement where I keep my tool box and six unlucky runaways. I was still wearing the right shoe, so I followed him down the stairs, (pad) Clomp (pad) Clomp (pad) Clomp past the designer kitchen, and set the shoe on the concrete counter. He got a couple of screwdrivers out of the tool box, found a little uneven spot in the seal of the tag, and started wedging.
The wedging went slow but well. He was able to slowly pull the two halves apart, and thought he was making good progress, when - BLORT - he busted an ink container inside it.
He looked like a failed bank robber. It was all over his hands, he got a few drops on his face, the brand new left shoe was stained all over, and it even dried on top of the clothes dryer and the maid couldn't get it off.
This is why I hate criminals. Criminals did this to me. In the old days, I would just go in, buy my shoes, and know that I could just lace them up and jog. Now I have to have a machine shop to get this thing off, and when I do, it ruins the shoe. We need bigger prisons in this country so that honest citizens don't get their shoes ruined by criminals.
So I called the police and told them that the guy at Edgewood Construction was a bank robber and they came and saw the ink and arrested him. I got a nice reward out of it, and am going back to get a new left shoe.
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