Thursday, January 14, 2010

My Inadvertant Criminal Career

When you live in a place where the temperature routinely gets to a point where it could re-arrange your anatomy without provocation, you end up having an entire wardrobe of winter gear. You have your "holy shit, that's cold" coat, which is totally ugly but entirely up to the job of keeping you warm, your "kind of cold, formal" coat, which is reasonably warm, but makes you look kind of attractive, your "sort of around freezing, casual" coat, which will keep you comfortable if you find yourself outside for less than an hour, and reasonably presentable. And there are all sorts of permutations in between; I guess the average Canadian has about 6 winter coats.
I have all of the above, and then some. One of my favorite coats is my plain, black wool number, that looks fine with jeans and skirts, is not too bulky (i.e does not make me look Michelin man-like at all) and can be worn 80% of the time between November and March.

This morning it was a little milder than it has been for the past month, and so I pulled out my trusty black winter coat (that I hadn't worn in a while) and put it on with my bitchin' silk scarf that elicits compliments wherever I go. When I put it on, I vaguely noticed that there were 3 buttons instead of 4, which felt kind of funny when I did it up, but I figured the bottom one fell off. Hmmm.

When I went to put my receipt from Starbucks into my pocket later this morning, the pockets were all sewn up, and I could't put anything in there. Didn't remember that from before. Hmmmm.

When I went out at lunch time to mail some letters, I picked up the coat from the rack in the staff room, from the Hindenburg of black wool coats that were hung up in the staff room. "Must be mine, because my gloves and scarf are in it, but I don't remember my coat being that long". Hmmm.

Just before I leave, I decide to go to the bathroom, and take off my coat. When I put it back on, my hand catches in the tear in the inner lining near the left arm. I never noticed that before. Hmmm... (You probably see where this is going long before I did...)

Wait a second....I DON'T THINK THIS IS MY BLACK WOOL COAT!!!!! A quick check to the label confirms that this is, indeed, NOT my coat. At all.
Clearly, I have stolen another person's coat. And I have gotten the better end of the deal, because I'm pretty sure this coat is much more expensive than my coat. This one claims it was made in Italy, and I'll bet my coat never saw Europe in it's life.

I have no idea who's coat this is, when I got it, or from when. I've been wracking my brains, but for the life of me, I have no clue whatsoever. My co-workers were splitting a gut laughing at me.

So....who's is it? And where did I get it? And when??? I think I'd like to know when, exactly, I entered a life of crime.

1 comment:

Anna said...

Larry's Party by Carol Shields - Larry accidentally took someone else's jacket and it changed his life!