Oh Happy Day and Dirty Little Lies Week, Day 2

Today’s winner of the Dirty Little Lies Week Giveaway is: PAM. Pam please email me your address and I’ll get you your prize. As for the rest of you, leave your comments here to be entered into tomorrow’s giveaway of this fabulous new release!

In other news. Today is also a doubly important date: it’s Sailor Boy’s Birthday, AND the day I turn in Secret Society Girl 2. Happy Birthday, Sailor Boy! I love his birthday, because it means the start to the part of the year where we are the same age. Yes, I’m petty like that.

So, yesterday, I went over to Panera to grab a sandwich. I was bundled up in my iPod, as usual, and so I didn’t notice at first that the man in front of me in line was screaming at the attendant that he was going to call the police. Apparently, he’d left his laptop on one of the tables in the restaurant, and it was stolen. Finally, the manager came over and took the man aside, where he continued his tirade. The manager was all, “Well, we take no responsibility for items left on tables. But sure, go ahead and call the police.” The weird part about it was that the shape of the man’s threats were such that he seemed to be saying that if the manager failed to produce the laptop like, right now, he’d be having HIM arrested for the theft.

So anyway, I’m standing there, with my scratched, year and a half old, clip-broken off iPod, and this other dude comes up to me and says, “Nice iPod. I just bought one like that.”

Me: “Cool.”

Him: “But it was stolen here yesterday.”

Me: (holding iPod closer to my body) “Wow, really?”

Him: “Yeah. I was downloading music and I left it plugged in and someone took it right off the table.”

Me: (thinking: his iPod was stolen off the table, but not the computer he plugged it into? And what is with people leaving their electronics lying around? I point to Mr. I’m-Calling-the-Police.) “You should talk to that guy. He just had his computer stolen off the table here too.”

Him: (looks at guy. dismisses him. turns back to me.) “Really?”

Me: “Yes, really. Maybe it was the same person. He’s calling the police right now. You should talk to him. Oh look, you’re up next.”

Seriously, though, was that guy insinuating that I’d stolen his iPod because I happened to be standing there with an iPod? Like they’re rare or something? Everyone in the place had one! You know, at the time, it didn’t occur to me that that was what he was getting at until he totally didn’t seem to care about a fellow victim and just wanted to talk about how his iPod had been stolen.

The reason why it didn’t occur to me that he was accusing me was because the state of my iPod is so totally not “brand new” and also, they don’t even MAKE my model of iPod anymore and haven’t for the last year (it’s an iPod photo, which was replaced by the iPod video). So I couldn’t take seriously the idea that he’d have a valid claim against a person who happened to be standing in line at the busy downtown Panera wearing an outdated iPod which features, among it’s thousands of tracks, the audio books of the entire Chronicles of Narnia series, not to mention Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Peter and the Shadow Thieves. I mean, that shit takes at least a day to upload. And everyone else in the store had an iPod too. And why did he think my iPod was “like his?” I totally can’t tell iPod model on sight, other than the obvious full size/mini/shuffle thing.

But I digress. The point is, don’t leave your electronics lying around in coffeeshops, and definitely don’t do it at my local Panera, because it’s apparently lift-a-laptop central over there.

PS: In passing, I’m going over some notes that my critique partners have left about SSG2. BOTH, in one particular scene, ask me “How long has passed? A few days? A few weeks?” I’m not exactly sure how to handle this. Usually, I’d add in something to the effect of “A few weeks later…” but that won’t really work here. Why? Because the scene STARTS as follows: “The next few weeks passed…” How much more explicit can I get? How is it that they both missed this? We writers spend so much time thinking about our first and last lines, and people skip right over them…