Shoplifters in the Red

No, it's not funny. Why would it be? Why would someone being arrested be funny?

The other day I was working at the Shell station in Slade, KY, when a woman came up to me to ask about the bananas we had stocked in the back. She mumbled and inched forward to the counter ever so slightly. Her eyes shifted about the room. Her small frame look feeble and weak. It was humid and at least ninety degrees outdoors. This woman was wearing black pants, a black shirt, a black hoodie, and a black bandanna. All her clothes appeared soiled. I was under the impression that she wasn't just some back-country Kentucky native, but a woman so far impoverished that she was borderline starving.

"Bananas? They're are eighty-nine cents." That's all I could say. I hadn't even heard her completely. I don't even think she asked for the price.

She nodded and walked off. I helped customer after customer, unaware of Wendy's (the assistant manager) attempt to help the woman. The woman asked Wendy about bananas, and as I suspect being overcome with the same impressions that I had, Wendy offered to buy a banana for the woman. The woman refused, and just then Wendy spotted a box of crackers in the woman's sleeve. After a few attempts to get the woman to go into the office with her, Wendy called over Hala (the manager). They both did their best to get the woman into the office. After they had the woman in there, they called the police. Two cops came, and the next thing I knew I witnessed a woman being escorted out of the gas station in handcuffs to be placed into an unmarked cop car.

And as it turns out, the woman had a knife on her and one in her bag. The police officers had to threaten the woman with a taser to get her to "give up the knife" on her person. I don't know the woman's intentions with the knife, nor will I ever. I don't know why she was shoplifting. To feed herself, her children, the thrills?

After the police left, and the store slowed down, a co-worker said to me, "man, that there was funny."

No, it wasn't. In what capacity could someone being arrested ever be considered funny?