Nov 3, 2021, 4:10 AM

Oooh. My turn.

Here is the tale of "Why You Shouldn't Do A Shitload of Meth Before You Attempt To Shoplift".

As a younger internet miscreant, back in the days when some areas of the country were still having to make long distance phone calls to get dial-up internet, I worked at a store that was a sort of a weird combination of Blockbuster Video and a Tower Records, but without any sort of corporate oversight.

At the front of said store, in our meager music section, we had a music demo kiosk, where we had the new releases we were pushing as well as a few albums selected by the employees as a poor attempt to humanize the store. You could walk up, put on headphones, and waste time listening to a full album without paying for it. The empty cases for the CDs being displayed were there as well as copies to buy.

One evening, about an hour before closing, around the time we lock one of the two double doors to sort of indicate we're about to close (this fact is important later on), a guy and his girlfriend entered the store doing their best impressions of this famous Monty Python sketch:

silly walks

The entire time they were doing this, their eyes were glazed and they would lose their balance every thirty seconds or so and have to catch themselves on whatever was nearby, be it the candy rack, a rack of rental movies, or the magazine rack. Each time, they'd knock stuff in the floor, making a mess for us to clean up, and immediately look at the nearest person and laugh when they righted themselves.

Eventually they worked their way all the way around the store and ended back at the CD preview kiosk thing at the front of the store, where they tried to look cute by listening to CDs together, by holding the headphones between them. As they were looking at the CDs, they kept looking back at the cash register area, and laughing. Eventually they silly walked over to the cash register, and set a bunch of the empty CD cases from the kiosk on the counter, as though they were going to buy them.

I look down at the cases, and as I'm about to say something, the girl laughs obnoxiously, grabs the empty cases, and both run for the door. The guy makes it through the unlocked door without issue, but the girl slips, and smashes her face into the pushbar on the door, crashing into the floor. As she picks herself up and pushes herself out the unlocked door, he's made it through the outer door of the store, and realizes that she's not keeping up with him. He turns around and because he doesn't have good control of his own equilibrium from whatever drugs he was likely on, he continues wobbling off the sidewalk and into the parking lot, just in time to get hit by a Volkswagen Beetle. The older kind, that was basically made of old APC metal and never dented. He gets knocked down and skids about 10 feet away as she gets out the door and screams bloody murder before picking him up and they both just laugh and continue running off into the night.

The entire time I'm just standing there watching this in bewilderment, because well, it was store policy to let the shoplifters run off to avoid possible violence, and also because the store manager was there and said to just let it go because it was empty demo cases.

TLDR: Two meth heads attempt to steal empty boxes and then perform a Buster Keaton routine attempting to flee the scene.