Saturday, March 31, 2012

Can I buy my sweatshirt back?

Don't you hate it when you go to Goodwill to find some used shorts that don't make you look like your father and you go into the dressing room and take off your sweatshirt and hang it up and then try the shorts on and decide they are as bad as anything you already own so you put them back on the rack and get on your vintage and sweet 1974 vespa ciao moped and drive off and are nearly sideswiped by a blind old lady and then you try to get to a Jack In The Box to take advantage of their buy one chicken sandwich and get another free deal but then you decide that their food is garbage and you already got scammed by a con artist this week so you need to conserve your money...so you ride your vintage and sweet 1974 vespa ciao moped back to the van you live in and cook up a meal of Ramen noodles and when it gets chilly in the evening you go to put your sweatshirt on and can't find it. You look everywhere. Where the hell is it? You had it at Goodwill and then...Oh Fuck! You left it at Goodwill in the dressing room and now Goodwill is closed.
So, you think that you will never get it back because there is no lost and found box at Goodwill since the whole store is basically a lost and found box that is for sale. The whole point of Goodwill is that you can leave stuff you don't want anymore and they will take it and sell it. But don't you hate it when Goodwill gets something that you didn't mean to give away. You've had that sweatshirt for 6 years and yes the zipper has broken and it has paint and bleach stains on it but it was cool when you first got it and it serves a function so...

So...the next day you have to ride your vintage and sweet 1974 vespa ciao moped all the way across the city again to go to the Goodwill to retrieve your sweatshirt. Of course it isn't in the dressing room. But where will it be? And what will happen if you find it? You search and search everywhere. It's a blue sweatshirt with a green hood. Hard to miss. You check in the Men's department but when was the last Goodwill you went to that had organized all their clothes perfectly? Underwear is with the jeans. Shirts are with coats. All the sizes are a mess. You hunt and hunt and move on to the women's section, perversely leafing through old lady sweaters looking for your own sweater. Then you find it with the women's sports bras. It's hanging on the rack and no one has bought it. You wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing. No one wanted your sweater at Goodwill but here you are hunting for it.

Oh well. You grab it and wonder if you should steal it, basically walk out with it and pretend it was yours all along but the way things are going these days you wouldn't be surprised if they had security monitoring you. Jesus, that would suck to be arrested stealing your own sweatshirt from a crappy Goodwill in Missouri. People kill themselves over less than that. So, you get in line. The worst thing that will happen is you will have to buy it back. But there is no price tag because the employee who put it back on the rack didn't really care that there was no price tag. He probably figured someone tore it off and then left it in the dressing room. Or maybe someone took it off and traded it for something. You get to the cashier.
"I'll ring you up." He reaches for your sweatshirt.
"Well, it's funny. I've got a funny story. This is my sweatshirt. I went into the dressing room and left it there yesterday."
The cashier's look tells you that he doesn't believe you. Why would he? This has to be the first time since he's worked there that someone is telling him that they left something in the dressing room and they want it back.
"See," you continue, "This paint spot is from when I just painted my friend's house. And look at the zipper! It broke and I tied this ribbon on there so I could pull it. And this bleach spot was a splash from this kitchen cleanup job I had around Christmas at a Lobster pound."
Your desperate tone wins the day. The cashier nods.
"You're all good."
You are relieved that you didn't have to shell out money for a sweatshirt you already own. And when that is a highlight of your day then you really have big problems.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.