But Daddy! I want an Oompa Loompa now!

Yesterday I was waiting by a pay phone for G to come out of the bank. A women walked up to the phone, leaned one of those impossibly huge, curse-inspiring, Louis Vuitton logo-emblazoned umbrellas against the side of the booth, made her call, and walked away...forgetting her umbrella. Before I could call out "Hey, you left your (albeit hideous, dangerous, space-monopolizing) umbrella..." a young girl stepped into to the booth and snatched it up in her hand. I assumed the girl, like me, was intending to call out to the woman, but instead she stood there silent, purposely hiding the umbrella behind her boyfriend's back until the woman was consumed by the crowd. Delighted she'd pulled off the crime, the girl turned to her boyfriend and said, "No I DIDN'T just score a Louis Vuitton!" to which he replied a congratulatory "Damn, girl!". Triumphant, they stepped into the crosswalk, both admiring her new accouterment.

As they reached the middle of the busy intersection the girl raised the umbrella over her head, depressed the lock mechanism and opened the chute. A deluge of filthy water that had been collecting in the cone rained down on her, completely soaking the entire right side of her designer jumpsuit and toppling what must have been a painfully time-consuming up-do. The girl shrieked, which caused about five hundred Memorial Day shoppers to turn and look --just in time to see the side of the umbrella collapse in a dog ear of dirty fabric that immediately encircled and adhered itself (and some an unidentifiable black-brown goo) to her head. Blind and increasingly pissed off, the girl flailed her arms and beat at the air like a kid whacking at a pinata, of course the more she did this the more entangled in her hair the contraption became, until it was hanging off the side of her head by a single matted clump. The boyfriend was doubled over at this point, holding his sides from laughing so hard; the onlookers just smirked. Humiliated by having to stand in traffic like some cyborg from Planet Fashion, she finally lost it and ripped the umbrella, and the clump of hair, right off her head.

I guess I have an evil streak, but nothing delights me more than watching a person get bitch-slapped by instant karma.