Thursday, July 9, 2009

Crimestoppers' Textbook

A couple of weeks ago, we purchased a new pc from WalMart. It was defective...something to do with the motherboard. What would Freud have said about that term???....hmmmm. Anyway, we packed the stupid thing right back in its original box...discretion forbids me from telling you the name of the manufacturer, but his initials are HP....and took it back to the store, where they were quite glad to swap it for another, better machine, which works fine and is made by the fine folks at Dell (Dell: the leader in home computing since 1989). But things took an interesting turn when the person at Customer Service had to call for someone from Electronics to come and inspect the computer we were returning. I mean, if someone at the Highly Problematic firm had checked over the machine that carefully in the first place, I would not have had to return it.

The Customer Service lady told us that people were ripping off WalMart by buying a new computer, then going home and putting their old junky computer in the new computer's box and bundling it all back up, then coming in for a refund by saying "This computer is no good!" Of course it's no good! It's like 9 years old and riddled with viruses from all the porn sites you surf! But, without checking these returned machines over, the WalMartians were getting burned.

Reminds me of another scam that a guy pulled when I worked at the A&P. This guy was actually one of my high school classmates and he should be ashamed of having stolen from the Tea Company, but here's what he did. Thanksgiving time, he's running a register, and he'd see a woman approaching his register with a turkey in her cart. He (let's call him "Bob," for that was his name) would tell the lady to just leave that heavy old bird right in the cart. Then he'd ring up the order, bag it all, and just as he finished loading up the cart again, he'd say "Oh! Forgot to charge you for the turkey...what's that price on there (leaning over, all gallant)..ok, that's $10.29" or whatever. The customer then would hand him money and he would ring up "No Sale", tender the loot, make change, and bid them a good day. Then when he balanced out, whatever he was over was his pure profit, his ill-gotten gain.

He got caught when a lady brought her bad turkey back right after the holiday, said it was awful and the manager cheerfully offered a cheerful refund. He just cheerfully needed to see her receipt. "Funny thing about that," she said, "when he rang it up, he rang up a no sale. There was no receipt." Nor cheerfulness, any longer.

The boss, who had been around the fairgrounds a time or two in his years with A&P, knew at once what the deal was. He had the lady point out the crooked cashier, who was summarily fired on the spot...turned in his red apron and name badge and banished. Gone.

I've heard more than one cop tell me that if only crooks, blessed as they are with inventive minds, organizational skills and the ability to act like they're right while they're wrong, would try functioning in the lawful segment of society, they would likely do well, because of their abilities and talent. Maybe they like the thrill of being bad.

But how do they sleep?

1 comment:

Peggy said...

"Bob" went on to work for an insurance company and did the same with them. He's made the rounds. He ended up in my office wearing rose colored glasses. I disliked him the minute I saw him and knew nothing of the grocery store scam. Funny, how things work out. If you will recall, we were on the phone when he walked through the door!