As soon as I walked into my local electronics store, I started to feel something was very wrong. As I browsed the aisles of gadgets I overheard a salesman saying “Male subject, purple New Zealand t-shirt, arriving one minute, $59, ten percent discount, powerbank, iPhone user.” Sure enough a purple clad man was walking away from him towards the cashier’s counter. But who was the salesman talking to? No one else was nearby. He was up to something, I was sure. So, like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple spying on all the neighbours while pretending to be gardening, I hid nearby behind a stack of party speakers **. After the next customer he brought his hand up to his mouth, spoke cryptically, and then slipped something back into his sleeve. Then I saw it. It was a walkie talkie microphone. Who was he communicating with? What was going on? Was he giving illegal discounts to anyone wearing purple? Was he warning the cashier about grumpy old men customers like me? Had organized crime taken over my local gadget store, and were they using it to launder dirty money in the washing machine section? I was sure the cashier was in on the deal somehow. She was very distinctive. The left side of the head was shaved, the right side hair was shoulder length and blue. With a Miss Marple flash of inspiration I realised that no one would be able to identify her if she simply changed her hair colour. She was a bit less secretive than the salesman and kept her walkie talkie under the counter, but turned away from the customers to mutter into it. I began to look around. I recalled how the security guard at the front door had been just a little too friendly, with a wide eyed x-ray stare. He reminded me of the helpful cobra in the children’s movie “The Jungle Book”, who hypnotized his victims before squeezing them to death and swallowing them whole. Friendly, but deadly. You learn a lot about evil and trickery from children’s movies. Then a thought struck me as I accidentally bumped a display of drone cameras and sent one toppling onto the floor. It automatically started up, hovered around like an angry bee and settled somewhere else. Just before I walked into the store, I had noticed a group of tourists sitting in a cafe outside photographing cups of coffee. Strange behavior. What would Miss Marple make of that? Suddenly I realized that they had devised the perfect way to covertly photograph passersby like me. The cup of coffee was held up high enough so that the phone could be recording the coffee, or my face. I started to sweat in panic. The cashier had undoubtedly skimmed my name and credit card details from the card reader, and I had given her my email address and phone number which she requested “to send you the receipt”. Miss Marple would not have fallen for that one. Were they targeting me for identity theft? Would they bombard me with spam and threatening phone calls until I co-operated with their nefarious plans? I decided to get to the bottom of this mystery crime scheme. I carefully concealed myself in the electronic dog feeder aisle and observed the salesman. He continued to talk to customers, then talk into his microphone after they’d gone.
I decided to confront him. I jumped out in front of him from behind a TV big enough to live in, hoping to jolt him into a confession.
“Look, I know exactly what you’re doing” (I peered at his employee ID badge) “John”.
“I know you’re targeting vulnerable citizens with some identity theft scheme or spotting potential kidnap victims for deadly biological warfare experiments in a secret laboratory out the back”.
“No, that’s not the game” said John with a smirk.
“Game is it? You call it a game” I responded, full of the self righteous indignation of a lucky escapee from death by spam.
“You don’t have much fun in your life, do you mister?” he responded with a tone of mock pity.
“Fun!” I responded. “Games! Fun and games!” I said angrily. “Well, what is this game, as you call it?”
“Come with me to the heart rate monitor aisle, and we’ll have a chat about it. It’s private there”. I skulked along behind him, vowing not to let him hook me up to any medical machine.
“You see Shorten” (I had already given him my name, address, email, phone number, passport and bank account details when I bought a USB flash drive from him). “Put yourself in my shoes. All we do here all day is talk to people like you who wouldn’t know a webcam from a spider web, or a MacBook from a Big Mac. We chat to you, confuse you with lots of tech talk, and show you a bewildering array of laptops or whatever, which all look basically the same. Then we sell you one for the highest price we think you will pay, send you to the cashier, and go to the next customer. Do you know what it is like doing that for 40 hours a week? It’s caps lock BORING that’s what it is. Deadly dull, like watching paint dry one day and watching grass grow the next”.
“So” I said, “you decided to turn to crime to spice up your lives, thrill of the chase, roar of the grease paint, smell of the crowd”.
“You’re closer than you think Shorten. Our game is to role play being undercover cops, spies or scammers. Today is identity theft Monday. We choose a likely target, get their information, and then each employee uses it to surprise and agitate a customer by mentioning their name, suburb, item purchased, footy team, holidays, etc. The cashier replies with your name without being told by you, the security man at the door says “Enjoy your holiday in New Zealand Mr Humourless” because you told me something about taking a vacation. It spooks a lot of people. Some run out screaming”.
“Cruel” I said.
“Not really” said John. “Just a bit of harmless amusement. It makes the day more interesting”.
“Look, I’m not the fun police” I said, “but I’m going to report this to the manager”.
John looked at me with narrowed eyes and bared teeth. “I am the manager” he roared, throwing off all pretense like the big bad wolf about to eat Little Red Riding Hood. He spoke something guttural into his sleeve. The half shaven-head cashier, made a cryptic announcement over the store PA, something about “Code Brown”. The security guard at the door started to pull down the metal grille. I ran for the exit, crashing through a DVD box set display. I hit the polished floor and slid under the grille like Indiana Jones, crashing into the coffee cup tourists outside in the cafe. They aimed a few karate kicks at me. I ran downstairs against the stream on the “Up” escalator, nursing my wounds and escaped into the carpark. Miss Marple would have been proud of me, if she were still alive.
© Geoff Milton 2021
** “Miss Marple always sees everything. Gardening is as good as a smoke screen, and the habit of observing birds through powerful glasses can always be turned to account”. From Agatha Christie “Murder at the vicarage” Chapter 2.
