A real class act

Less than an hour ahead of closing, a guy comes into the store. However, on this occasion mental alarms are chiming. I give him a closer examination but the feeling persists. There is nothing untoward about his attire; no suspicious postures or behaviors. So I amble over to our "Wall of Shame" and lo and behold, there's his picture.

Just to be sure I ask to see his ID. He hands it over. Unquestionably, it is him.

We have a problem. Unfortunately it looks like you've been eighty-sixed from the premises.

Cue the shock and questions as to why.

In exceedingly brief and general terms, I tell him and once again repeat that he needs to be vacating the vicinity.

He then begins to construct an increasingly convoluted theory to explain how he had been framed. Someone was taking vengeance upon his head for taking the high road and refusing to sleep with the guy. Liberally salted within these protestations are the assertions that he has his own business as if that bore any relevance to the issue at hand.

He still had to leave. I was unmoved.

He asked who he would have to see to get the ruling overturned. I pointed out that it would make for a clever trick being as stepping on the property constituted criminal trespass at this juncture. He still wanted my name or employee number.

Whatever capital he had managed to gain in his apparent befuddlement and quietly phrased disavowals was lost as he quit my threshold.

"It's because I'm brown, isn't it. Take the word of the white guy over the Latino guy."

Wow. That just makes me want to contort myself into a pretzel just to prove I'm not a racist. Or I assume that's what the hoped for aim is. This had nothing at all to do with race. It has to do with keeping a thief out of our store. If things went so sour as to get your photo on our wall, the benefit of the doubt is going to be with the establishment.

But thank you for adding a gratuitous dollop of insinuation. I'm sure everyone who has struggled to establish racial equality through the years is gratified at your reducing their efforts to a throw-away sop when things do not go your way.

Finch-felcher.