Tag Archives: life

Hey there. First of all, nice job. I’m not certain how you got my card number and PIN. (I’m thinking of blaming the time that same afternoon when I went to that ARCO station, convenience winning out against my principles; perhaps you tapped into their machine to collect my keystrokes. I don’t even know if that makes sense — I’m sounding as tech-savvy as a 90s Sandra Bullock movie, so I’ll stop speculating now.) But somehow you got them, and you were able to make a fake card to complete real purchases. Kudos to your enterprising endeavors.

However, once you got my info, I think you could have handled the situation a little better. I mean, if you had more closely hewed to my spending habits, you could have ridden my card for days. The credit union wouldn’t have noticed. And, confession time, just between you and me: I don’t really check my balance as often as I should. It would have taken me a while to pick up on the money drain.

Going to Target to buy merchandise and get cash back wasn’t necessarily a bad start; but I’ve never been to Torrance apart from times when the freeways are jammed and I need to get to LAX. Job Lots was even more suspect. And you finally got cut off when you tried to buy some baby stuff at a baby stuff store. I don’t really do baby stuff.

(I also don’t normally eat at Chipoltle. But I’m glad you took a break to have lunch. You can work up quite the appetite from shopping and petty larceny.)

Then again, I guess it’s not your job to know anything about me. All I am to you is a row of numbers. And all you are to me is a pile of bank paperwork I had to fill out in duplicate. I had visions of seeing security footage of you in action, of standing between two bantering, racially-diverse police detectives as we look through a two-way mirror, watching you sweat it out in The Box. Then I’d really get to know you.

But of course that never happened. After taking the time to complete the reports and waiting a few business days, I got the money refunded into my account. I was only temporarily and temporally inconvenienced, and you had a pretty decent score. You got to keep the $214 in goods and $200 in cash. Plus the burritos, and the $5.11 you spent at a 7-Eleven right before getting cut off. It was almost 100 degrees that Saturday, so I have to assume you took a late-afternoon break to get a couple of slurpees. Maybe you mixed some of the flavors together, like the cherry and the Coke ones, just like I do. Maybe we aren’t really all that different.

Except we totally are. Please don’t steal my shit again. And feel free to burn in hell.