How not to take up a life of crime

I'm not entirely sure what's different about the update page. Call me stupid if you like; yeah, it looks different, but is it functionally any different? Anyway. Moving on, a brief cautionary tale about living in a small village.

As usual, this story is best told starting from the end, or at least from a point towards the end, which is the point early this afternoon when I was at work, trying to find The Book of General Ignorance for a customer when Jon called from the front, "Iona, come out here! The police are here to see you!"

Ahem. Yes. Yesterday morning, I was sitting in the bookshop at the front counter - the only counter, but never mind - peering between the books in the window at the post office opposite, watching out for the morning delivery man. (We should get three sets of boxes each day - one from each wholesaler. But they keep skipping days, and getting confused about everything, and one memorable morning last week I walked in to find three disgruntled co-workers standing amid twenty-two boxes. It was horrific. I digress.) He didn't come. I was zoned out. And then I heard someone scream. In about five seconds a whole lot of people were shouting and I was watching an elderly lady hitting the ground.

It took about five seconds to register and then someone from outside yelling, "She's been hit by a car!" before I ran out there, ran back in, flailed at Tony (who was very calmly ringing 999), ran back out carrying the counter chair on top of my head and watching people help the old lady off the road and into it. She was screaming and crying, which I took for a good sign, and a very shaky woman got out of the car and burst into tears, flailed, got back in the car and put her lights on, got back out, cried some more, and then two adventurers returned bearing a very frightened-looking man: the old lady's husband, whom she'd been going to meet.

It's weird, I think, how people's brains work in times of crisis. The old lady was babbling about the hairdresser, she'd been going to the hairdresser, what about the hairdresser, and so on, and the hairdressers themselves - who are next door to the bookshop - emerged and said she should get into the warm. And I wandered back into the bookshop, served a customer with my brain elsewhere, and the ambulance arrived ten minutes after the accident. (Not as impressive as it sounds; the ambulance station is literally half a mile away.) The men from inside that diagnosed shock, checked her over for broken bones, found none, prescribed a taxi home and a nice cup of tea.

In all of this, the driver of the car got back into it and drove quietly away.

So I went back inside, relayed this story, made coffee for all of us and got back to the work of the day, unpacking the eleventy million boxes and serving customers getting panicky over Christmas. This is the best time of year for customers surprising you - teenage skinheads buying Jane Austen, genteel old women buying The Clockwork Orange, everyone in the world buying Hogfather - and I really did figure that was the end of the excitement for the time being. I actually came back to work in the shop two weeks ago to be regaled with previous excitements - stories of how there'd been a break-in, no, actually, two break-ins. The money was in the safe, so the thieves couldn't get to it; instead, they stole all the book tokens and three charity boxes.

This is evidence for it already - the three boxes were full, made a lot of noise and weighed about two kilos each, with probable value of less than ten pounds - but it soon became increasingly apparent that these thieves weren't very bright. Okay, fair enough, they got away with four thousand pounds' worth of book tokens, which they could indeed sell on or spend. They chose to spend them. In Pritchard's in Crosby. Ohmygod. Who is stupid enough to spend their haul in the same shop they stole it from? Who, just who is that stupid?

Anyway. Their court date is next month.

Back to this morning, and the first thing that happened was my walking in to find the computer buggered. What followed was an hour of faffing with monitors and keyboards and switching wires around, which was decidedly unfun, losing the key to the cupboard (last time we did that, we locked the key to the cupboard into the safe the key for which was in the cupboard we were trying to find the key for) and putting washing-up liquid into the tea again. And then the police came.

Well, it was one policewoman in bright reflective yellow, and she wanted to talk to me. She was disappointed to hear that I hadn't actually seen the car hit the woman, only the immediate aftermath, but it transpired that no one had taken much notice of the driver or the car, even though they had been there for at least five minutes. Of course, I know nothing about cars. All I could say that it was "small and purple", and the driver was female and old.(By not leaving her details, she is apparently committing an offence.) She asked for my name and phone number, which I gave, and said she'd be taking a statement from me sometime before Christmas. She bid me a formal goodbye, and then turned to go. At the door, she stopped, turned around and asked, "Oh, while I'm here, did my books come in?"

I burst out laughing, took her name and phone number and proceeded to track them down. It took a while to find them, because they didn't appear on the system under her name. At length, we discovered that Jon had not caught her name when first informed of it, and had put her on the database as, well, something else.

I tried to remove it in time, but she took the book and ended up seeing the printed slip anyway.

There's probably a moral to this story, but I'm not entirely sure what it is. It might be "don't have hit-and-run accidents" or just "keep calm and ring for an ambulance", but I think it's probably more likely to be something like: "when you don't hear someone's name, ask them to repeat it, and don't enter them on the database as 'Mrs Nice Police Lady.'"