The Donut Heist

We all lie.

Or maybe we don’t. I haven’t met all of us.

But plenty of us lie. We make ourselves believe what we want ourselves to believe, and then we try to convince others of it. Anything you think, you think it because you want to think it, whether you think you do or not. It seems very likely that you have certain thoughts in your head that you tell yourself you wish that you didn’t. But honestly, if you really didn’t want them there, you would be in complete control of making those thoughts disappear.

See what I did there? I lied. I don’t think anyone truly controls the way their mind works.

Lying is almost another language. It can be learned, adapted, practiced, and ultimately perfected. There are different styles to it. There is acting, like on a stage or in a recorded performance. There is auditory performance, such as phone sex, music, or even some customer service lines. There are professions where lying isn’t technically encouraged, but is probably vital. Used car saleman comes to mind. There is lying for different reasons, like not wanting to have to deal with consequences (“Officer, I had NO IDEA that the speed limit had gone down to 35 here, and would NEVER have sped otherwise!), like hoping to gain some kind of financial or material gain(“I SWEAR, they delivered the television to me and it was ALREADY cracked like that, honestly…”) there is lying out of fear (“Baby, I don’t know who that woman is or WHY she would ever think that it was me that got her pregnant”) or out of habit (“I didn’t see nothin’, I ain’t hear nothin’, and I ain’t saying nothin.”).

Lying is sometimes very necessary. Sometimes you straight up NEED to lie. Sometimes you need to feign ignorance, sometimes you need to have not seen or heard something. Plenty of times in my life I created an embarrassing moment that no one else needed to know, so I just omitted it from things for other people to learn about. Later on, if anyone asked if anything had happened in a situation, I would neglect to mention such instances. Easy, simple, and still a lie. I mean, how many times have people asked you how things were going, and you just said, “Oh, you know, good. How about you?” and your entire month was pure shitty, dreary, horrible time in your life? Your dog had just been hit by a car, or your boss was making a pass at you and threatening to fire you if you didn’t flirt back at least, there was a fire in the house that you grew up in, or there was some terrible storm in your area and you were sick with the flu and had thrown up literally half a minute ago. Or something in the same league as the horrible things I’m describing. But someone asks how it’s going, and rather than be honest and bring them down to your level, you just shrug it off and turn the subject back onto them. I’m not saying you do it all the time, but you totally do it sometime. Everyone does. The world would be so much more exhausting if people said exactly how shitty of a time they were having with life at the moment. It would be horrible, and people would stop asking each other how it was going because they’d already be so depressed and wouldn’t be able to take on anymore pain and emotional anguish of even one more problem from someone else.

And sometimes you lie without realizing you lied. Sometimes you tell a lie because you didn’t know you were lying. Recently I went to Woodman’s in the morning because I was going to buy some donuts. I hate going to Woodman’s, because it’s a supermarket that seems set on operating like they’re in the midst of a perpetual going-out-of-business sale. There are tons of lines, relatively good prices, and basically no one working there, and the few that are don’t seem to know anything about what’s going on there. And it’s always packed, no matter what day and what time of day, so it just adds to the feeling that something terrible is about to happen and people are making a supply run in preparation of the worst. Which in turn makes you feel maybe you too should shop a little more. So essentially, it is a successful tactic.

Anyway, I go in, and I pick up one of the boxes that you have to fold out yourself in order to use, and it took me a sec, but I got it. And I choose my donuts, and the selection is pretty good, so I go with a dozen, just all kinds, I throw 6 or 7 types of donuts in the box. I close it up, and I go to the check out. Now for donuts, you’re supposed to write on the box how many you got, so they can charge you the right amount per donut. But the lines were insane, even at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, there were still an unnecessarily large amount of people at Woodmans. But I saw that self-checkout was short, so I went over there.

The machine for the check out wanted a barcode, but obviously the donuts didn’t come with that, that would be weird. In fact, I don’t want a donut that has a barcode on it. Anyway, I go to item search, find donuts, and type in that I had got 12 of them. I pay the amount at the machine, get my receipt, and I go to walk out, and one of the six people that works there stops me, and informs me that I shouldn’t have gone to the self-checkout with something that isn’t scanned. I say, Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t know, I won’t do it again. She said she understands, but she needs me to go back and wait in line with the people that have a cashier so that they can check me out as I’m supposed to. I tell her, no, I’m not gonna do that, one because I already paid and have a receipt, two because what she’s proposing wastes my time. The time of the cashier, the time of the people who have to wait in line behind me, me, her for telling me this, literally everyone in the scenario comes out with less life to live because of this transaction. I remind her that I can just show her the donuts and the receipt, and we can basically go on with our morning.

The clerk there is about to protest again when the customer who was in line behind me walks up, also with a box of donuts, and she says something to the effect that I should be allowed to go because she saw me do exactly what I was supposed to and that the cashier lady was basically just racial profiling and did they need a lawsuit on their hands over some donuts, blah blah blah. I really wasn’t even gonna play the race card, because I could totally see why they wouldn’t want me to do it that way, but screw it, now I’ve got backup. I got this old white lady in green overalls and long frizzy gray hair, who looks like she feeds her seventeen cats milk out of a baby bottle, and she’s on my side and is way better at this confrontation thing than I am.

Anyway, the clerk there totally backs off and apologizes, obviously wanting now to show that she meant nothing racial about her inquiry and have a nice day. That or she remembers, “I work at an enormous grocery store, this can’t possibly be worth the payoff even if I’m right. Who even gives a shit about these donuts?” I shrug it off and say it’s cool and I walk out with this other woman, this older white woman, and as we’re getting to the cars, I say that I appreciate it and that it wasn’t the clerk’s fault, and that she didn’t have to step up in my defense but did and I thought it was a nice gesture. She told me, just before she walked away towards her car, that she knew that I hadn’t stolen any donuts, but that when she saw the clerk bother me, she walked away from the check out machine without paying. So by coming to aid me, what she was really doing was stealing donuts and a lot of other groceries in the exact way that the clerk was trying to prevent! And then we just walked out together, me being complicit in this donut heist.

So I thought about that for a while. Well played, larcenous cat lady. You obviously shouldn’t steal. But then again, no one even asked her if she was stealing, so she didn’t have to lie about it. Maybe she would have owned up to it if the clerk had thought to ask cat lady the same questions she asked me. I’m curious how that would have gone to this day.

The best part about all of this was, when I got to where I was going, and we opened up the donuts to eat, my girlfriend gave me crap for shoving 14 donuts in the box so haphazardly.