Thieves and Things

when i saw the chart that explained fifteen pairs of shoes were stolen every day of the past year, i was excited. i was once informed that there is one golden gate bridge suicide every two weeks, but that was never something i wanted to see. i saw it happen twice and there were no redeeming qualities that made either experience worthwhile. but thieves-- oh, thieves-- they are a type of bad i would love to run into at the work-place. and at fifteen a day, it's a soft guarantee.

i am, admittedly, a voyeur of sorts. but, in fairness, i'm also quite an exhibitionist. i may gain great pleasure from watching a stranger do boring things, but i am completely fine with you doing the same to me.

and there is something that i love about thieves. i can't put it into words exactly, but to watch a thief is like getting to rate someone's cleverness. look, you can buy a nikon d40 ($675) and d90 ($975), sell the d90 on ebay and return the d40 in the d90's box for full price within thirty days-- you'll make almost $300 in profit because the d40 and 90 have the same camera body and no one ever notices the tiny pill-sized piece of silver that says the model number. anyone can do it, but i would catch you. it's a battle of wits. if you get by me, you win: you out-clevered me.

i'm a sucker for that sort of game.

i missed a girl break down crying after being caught trying to steal these chucks.

my first day of training was surprisingly laid back, and that may have been related to the my floor being men's shoes and well away from the chaos known as women's boots. but, for the most part it seems like the job is doing a mixture of fixing the placement of shoe displays and pretending to fix the placement of shoe displays. but, whether the fixing is fake or legitimate, the real goal is to talk to every customer and be sure s/he is happy.

at first i was an odd form of shy-- i had no trouble talking with co-workers, but there was a fear preventing me from doing much more than smiling at the shoe-browsing strangers. it's likely because i know nothing of shoes and felt a bit out of my conversational element in a shoe store dressed as a shoe-lover. this must've been how bruce wayne felt when he slow-danced with selina kyle. batman and catwoman: so, what do we do now?

something about the experience reminded me a bit of a library. it's all very gentle and the customers are not very talkative because they're looking for something that says something about who they are. there is a difference between the way someone shops for a camera and the way the same person shops for shoes. there are differences in everything. even when i was a tour guide and was dating a server who worked on the wharf, we both had separate ideas of which tourists tipped well and which did not. but, people are different with their food and their entertainment. while some countries refused to tip her, those same countries would tip me amazingly-- and vice versa.

based off just one five hour shift at the shoe store, it seems the audience of shoe-buyers are delicate, but friendly. if i smile at them, they will smile at me-- men and women alike seem to thoroughly enjoy the smile, and so much more than any other job i've previously had. it's like they're not expecting it while buying shoes. they expect it from their tour guide and so they don't always appreciate it when it comes because it may not be genuine. but it's much harder to have a conversation with a shoe-buyer than it is a tourist. you sort of have to sit back and let them decide to talk to you.

the first conversation i had was short and direct. a middle-aged man in a double-breasted business suit approached me with a great stride. he was confident and began making eye-contact with me well before his voice would've been able to reach me and continued to until his stride brought him to me.

"men's wallets!" he said in a voice that had confident charm and resembled a public relations person.

i pointed him the right direction and felt good knowing i was able to talk to my first customer without being question on any shoe-related knowledge. also, i was happy i knew where the wallets were.

shortly after, i returned to my wandering of the floor-- tying undone laces, repositioning backwards shoes, tracing down the homes of discarded loafers, and generally tidying up. people are much more ruthless with sneakers-- tossing them everywhere and leaving boxes destroyed-- but, the people looking for loafers are just creatively stupid. they manage to take one dress shoe and put it in the wrong box four aisles away as if that's just how it's done.

but, i was cleaning up a rack of scarves and socks when i realized what all had happened.

there were three small boxes with nothing inside, hanging out at the base of the men's wallet stand. that fucking business man.

we all have our preconceptions of thieves and what they might look like. and he knew. he waltzed over well-dressed in his navy-blue pin-stripped suit and declared, "i am interested in stealing three wallets but cannot locate them-- would you mind aiding me in my quest?" and he got me. i showed him the wallets and sat back smiling at the fact i had talked to my first shoe-stranger.

why would he steal? he has a nice suit and he talked to me. i'll just let him do whatever he wants over by the wallets and i won't even check on him because he's the type of guy who would come to me if he needed help.

it's funny because i've always said that indiana jones is realistic in the sense that you really only have to dress like a nazi for other nazis to believe you're one of them. there's that classic scene in so many movies where the hero's hand grabs the guard from off-screen, there's a punch sound effect, and then emerges the hero in the guard's uniform. and everyone says it's hokey and unrealistic. but it's real. i used to dress as ups delivery men, or janitors, and people believed it based on nothing other than the uniform. once, i was even dressed as a magician and performed failed magic tricks for hours, but people stayed to watch because they thought maybe it was just a part of my magical act.

and despite all of that, this blue-suited man got me with my own god damn trick. he dressed like someone who wouldn't steal and confidently stole in front of me. i can't believe i was gotten.

on a side note, i kind of want those purple chucks. girl's shoes or not.