Black Friday PSA

As Black Friday dawns, I want to remind all the frantic shoppers out there of one important thing. As you scour the stores for the best deal of the season and fight it out with the woman next to you for the last lead-free toy left on shelves, don't forget to keep a watch on your belongings.

On Tuesday I was shoe shopping, and as I tried on a pair of shoes, I naturally rested my purse on the floor for a moment. I turned around to retrieve it and it wasn't there. The store wasn't even that crowded, yet someone had still made off with it. We searched the store for about an hour, aisle after aisle, until I realized there was really nothing more I could do than just leave my phone number with the manager and hope for the best.

As I walked around peering under racks, I was proud of myself for not panicking. I've gotten a lot better at that whole not panicking thing over the past few months, finally internalizing the fact that freaking out does absolutely nothing to change the situation. (The closest I've come to that heart-pounding panic lately is the one time I called the guy I like, but that's panic of a slightly different sort). I remembered that sometime last summer I spent about two painstaking hours copying all the numbers from my cell phone, by hand, into a notebook. Plus, there wasn't more than $30 in the wallet and the credit card could be canceled. The things I actually missed most was actually the business card from the Indian restaurant Supraja and I ate dinner at in Paris and this list I made in 8th or 9th grade of the 100 things I wanted to do before I die (which I later realized wasn't even in the wallet). And there could be a bright side to this - after all, hadn't I been saying I needed to get a new purse.

Luckily, perhaps very luckily, I got a phone call from Papa early Wednesday morning saying that the store called and that they'd found the purse wedged under the clearance rack. Everything but the cash was still there, including the red wallet that I lamented losing (I think I may have been more sad at losing the wallet itself than the actual purse).

So, moral of this story is, no matter how unlikely you think it is, please please keep vigilant watch over your purse, shopping bags, and most importantly young kids, because as cliche as it is, it really only takes an instant for them to disappear, and no matter how much you think otherwise, yes, it can happen to you. So take inventory of everything in your wallet, write all your cell phone numbers somewhere, and while we're at it, don't forget to back up your computers' hard drives, save all your digital photographs to CDs and change your smoke detector batteries, because we all know that the last thing anyone needs during this time of year is more stress.