Unattended Belongings

I was eating lunch in the hospital cafeteria the other day when a woman sitting in the booth next to me leaned over.

"Excuse me," she said. "Are you going to be sitting here for a few minutes?"
Before I could answer in the affirmative, the woman said, "Would you mind watching my stuff for me?"
The assignment seemed to be relatively low risk, so I nodded my head.

I waited for the woman to exit the cafeteria before peering over the booth to see what I was babysitting. Included among the objects scattered across the table was a laptop, a BlackBerry, and a large red purse.

The sight of what I conservatively estimated to be $3,000 worth of electronics made me feel very relieved that I was not the stupid person who had asked a complete stranger to protect my valuables from other strangers. I was just the stupid stranger who agreed to do it.

I spent the next five minutes feeling resentful over my loss of freedom. I spent the five minutes after that trying to figure out ways to displace some of my stupidity onto others.

I thought first about asking another stranger to watch the woman's stuff. Then I thought about hiding the woman's stuff (to teach her a lesson). Eventually I combined the two ideas and came up with my best idea yet: asking a stranger to hide the woman's stuff. I was mentally interviewing two prospective job candidates--a man with two screws protruding from his left temple and a woman who was stabbing hundreds of small holes into the top of a piece of apple pie with a plastic fork--when the owner of the electronics store returned, carrying a chopped salad and a Diet Pepsi.

"Thanks!" she chirped, and sat down.

I gave the man with the screws in his head a sympathetic look, not because he had screws in his head, but because my hesitation cost him the opportunity to play hide-and-seek.