The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. Today I was caught shoplifting.

It all started when I decided to go out and steal clothes. So I cycled my bike to a big department store in Montreal called Les Ailes. There, I stuffed two jumpers into my bag in the changing room. Then I walked out of the store, no one any the wiser.

I should have gone home after that. I should have quit while I was ahead.

But instead, I went to another department store, this one called Simons. It was a lot busier than Les Ailes. People were everywhere. I found three T-shirts. I think they were $20 each.

After walking around the store for a few minutes, pretending to look at other clothes, I walked out of the store with the T-shirts under my arm.

I'd done it again: another successful score!

"Excuse me."

I turned. There was a beefy security guard behind me. There were also several plain-clothes security staff approaching me from different directions of the street, like agents from The Matrix. I was surrounded.

"Can you come back to the store," said the beefy security guard. It wasn't a question.

I would like to say that I ran away, and the guards chased me all over Montreal, including through people's back gardens and washing lines, until I finally got away by climbing over a chain-link fence and heroically jumping onto a moving train. And as the train pulled away to another city, I waved the stolen t-shirts in victory at the cursing, panting guards.

That's what I should have done. But I didn't do any of that. Instead, I just meekly went back into the store with the guards.

They led me to a white, windowless room and left me there. One guard stayed in the room with me to make sure I didn't try to escape somehow. I don't know how they thought I was going to escape. Maybe they thought I was going to walk through the wall by vibrating my molecules at the same frequency as air, like the Flash. (I can't do that, by the way.)

The police took ages to arrive. I guess they had more serious crimes to attend to first, like literally anything else. In the meantime, all I could do was sit there, with the loss prevention officer sitting across the table avoiding eye contact with me.

And all the while I was thinking about my bag. Remember those two jumpers I stole earlier from Les Ailes? Those jumpers were still in my bag. The bag that was sitting on the floor by my feet. The bag that no one had searched yet.

When the police finally arrived, they checked my criminal record. When they found I had no criminal history, they just said I could go! Hooray for Canada!

But when I got up to leave, a security guard said, “Don’t forget your bag”. Immediately all attention was focused on my bag, lying crumpled on the floor, and bulging with stolen clothes.

The cops then had a discussion about my bag.

"Did you search the bag yet?" said one cop to the loss prevention officer.

"No," replied the loss prevention officer.

"Should we search it?" said the cop to the other cop.

Finally, for some reason, they decided not to search my bag. Maybe God intervened. Or maybe it was because I was already halfway out the door by this point and they couldn't be bothered to call me back.

But if they had searched my bag, I would have had to explain why it contained two jumpers with price tags still on them. And I'm not sure I could have come up with a convincing explanation other than "I stole them".