Many of you, no doubt, have heard the story about Brianna Priddy, the waitress at an Applebee's (they can't seem to stay out of the news, can they?) in Colorado who got the shock of her life when she asked a customer for a driver's license, and got handed her own license that had been stolen from her about 2 weeks before. One report on the story is from HuffPo. Priddy obviously had a lot of headaches to deal with as a result of losing her wallet with the driver's license, but fortunately this was one of those rare cases when karma did come back to bite the thief. Yet in a strange why, I can guess why the thief did what she did at that moment. More below the flip.....
Obviously the sheer stupidity of a person pulling out the wrong driver's license, especially when the person in the picture doesn't look 100% like you, beggars belief. It's even more dumb when you realize that the accused thief is 26, i.e. of legal age to drink, and could have used her own driver's license if she had been thinking on all cylinders. It's not as though one is in college and is using a fake ID, where if the name is fake, at least the picture is your own. In addition, it was incredibly dumb of the thief to keep carrying Priddy's license in her wallet, unless of course she was using it and Priddy's credit cards to keep ringing up purchases.
(For the record, I never had a fake ID and never drank in college. Didn't start drinking socially until age 25. How's that for loser? But 3CM digresses, as usual.)
What I think what happened with the accused thief is simply this. She was in a hurry to grab some form of ID when the waitress stopped by. She rifled through all the cards in her wallet, and saw what looked like her driver's license. So she handed it to Priddy without paying close attention to the particular ID that it was. In other words, it was just pure accident. Whether the thief is that stupid in everyday real life isn't certain, but in this one instance, her stupidity is revealed for all to see. It'll get even more interesting when her name leaks out, as it eventually will.
The reason that I think that this was just a dumb accident on the thief's part is based on a similar, though not nearly as downstream catastrophic, experience of mine. I was on a business trip not long ago and had dinner with some clients. The waitress came by to settle the bills for each of us, and I reached in to get my business credit card. Then I saw the bill and the card, and the latter turned out to be my bank card, not my business credit card. In the hurry, not to mention slightly lowered light, my bank card looked enough like the business cc that I simply grabbed the wrong card to hand to the waitress. It's not that I won't eventually get reimbursed, but I wasn't supposed to use anything but my business cc because of the $ amount involved. Thus it's not hard to imagine that this was the accused thief did with respect to Priddy's driver's license. She's paying now for her carelessness, and deservedly so.
So the moral of the story: look carefully at your plastic when at a restaurant, or elsewhere. With that time, for the usual SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories of the week....