Casual Crime, Casual Reaction

So the other night I was sitting by the window at some bar drinking beers with a friend of mine. It was one of those places where the windows are like doors and the place becomes like an outdoor place. It was probably around midnite and we were talking about the best approach to approach these two chicks at a bar. We couldn't really think of anything good. Go up and say hi? Then what? We thought about going for the 'big spill' (aka spilling a beer on them to get their attention) but that seemed like a bad move. Who knows. We didn't..

Anyway there's a payphone stand on the sidewalk next to this bar and I see a guy who looks homeless or semi-homeless go up to the payphone. He takes out this big wire with sort of a hook on the end and he feeds it down into the coinslot. I was like, 'Hey! Check out that dude! What's he doing?' So we watched him while we drank our beers. Basically he's like jiggling this wire thing down into the phone and after 15 seconds we hear change start to clink down into the coin return thing. The faster he jiggled it the more change would clink down in the tray. It was like a payphone slot machine. He kept taking the coins and putting them in his pocket then go back to the jiggle move.

We just basically sat there and stared at him. He was like 10 feet away! Doing crime! Like right there! The guy looked over at us at one point and stopped- then he sort shrugged then went back to the jiggling. We sipped our beers and thought about how to handle the situation. Call the cops? Tell the guy to stop? Confront him? What were we supposed to do? What could we do really? I didn't want to get stabbed. So we sipped our beers and watched the robbery go by.

After jiggling it for a bit with no coins clinking he pulled the wire out and headed down the street. We settled into vetoing the idea of a citizen's arrest and refocused on drinking beers and not talking to the girls at the bar. Comfortable that whatever that was it wasn't worth it.

ok bye!

tOdd