The Rogue And The Rug Rats

The Rogue And The Rug Rats


Part One: Roguish activity

"Herein, I dub thee, The Rogue!" I said to myself silently.

I could hardly believe what I saw happening as I watched the actions of a short, stout, middle-aged man, who I had become friends with over the past year. He had walked part way across the room and stopped to chat with a happy-go-lucky, chubby woman, who was standing beside her desk.

He looked her straight in the eye and while she was caught in a momentary trance, by his supposedly loving gaze, his other hand reached around behind her and across her desk. He grabbed something, which he was quickly pocketed. I was shocked at what I had just witnessed him doing.

Obviously, this was not the first time that he had engaged in this kind of roguish activity at work.

As I watched him time and time again, the reality of this kind of repetitive behaviour became increasingly evident. No one around him had any idea of what he was doing. He managed to get away with it, time after time, as he went from desk to desk, always repeating the same actions.

"This guy is really just a petty thief," I thought. "I wonder if anyone has ever caught the crook?"

Always having been a 'softie' and graciously compassionate towards waifs and orphans, I felt sorry for the guy, even with his shifty eyes and nimble fingers. Looking at his fingers up close, they were short and stubby, with his nails having been bitten off right to the tips. His hands never seemed very clean. But then he said that he had given up on using soap, particularly anti-bacterial soap, claiming that it was bad for his health.

Generally, his whole appearance was that of a nervous, lost-orphan kind of a ragamuffin. He seemed to lack any kind of discipline in terms of his mannerisms and personal attire.

He usually wore the same clothing every day, a very baggy pair of old, black, jogging shorts and a worn t-shirt. He was rather bow-legged and always had on the same grimy looking, off-white, sports socks and a pair of worn out, dirty, white runners, with holes in the toes. The laces that had been broken and re-tied, bounced along beside him as he walked, like some sort of a silvery shadow.

He only seemed to own one extremely old, grayish-green jacket and a tattered brown hat with a very large rim that hung over his face most of the time. There was a collection of different pins around the outside of the hat. I had no doubt any longer about how he had attained those.

Up close, he seemed to be a kind and gentle enough person and relatively well spoken, although he tended to be hard of hearing. His conversations were relatively limited to what he was wanted to chat about though.

Those stories were generally told at some length and with massive detail to anyone with a listening ear. The larger the audience, the better he liked it. But he would often walk away from the person with whom he was speaking and begin talking to a different person, in the middle of a conversation.

He really did not seem to be an objectionable person, but his shoulder length, shaggy blondish hair, tied back from his face and his bushy, pointed eyebrows, with the spectacles that he wore, perched on the bottom of his nose, made him into sort of an archaic figure at best.

When asked about his glasses, he replied, "They are the one dollar kind that you buy in the drug store. They are good enough for me." I wondered if he had actually bought them, or if they too had been pocketed by him, somewhere in his travels.

I rather suspected that most of his purchases were made in a second hand shop, if they were legitimate purchases at all. The reason I suggest this, is that I watched him as he tagged along behind me one day, in a dollar shop.

He went from item to item, carefully examining things, but when it came time to go to the till, he stood in the line up, very close behind me and then suddenly exited very quickly, just before he got to the cash register, without having made any actual purchases.

He waited for me by the door, supposedly examining the headlines on a newspaper. Later on, I spotted one of the items he had examined, protruding from his pocket. But I could not say anything, as I really had no idea whether it was something that he purchased at an earlier date, or if it was something that he had accidentally or intentionally walked off with, from the dollar store at this time. I did not even want to ask, as I suspect that he would not have told me the truth anyhow.

He often tagged along behind me or invited me to go for a walk. His destination was generally the bank and the coffee shop, when he gave me an invitation to join him. The first time, he showed me that he had fifty six cents on his savings account. Feeling sorry for him, I graciously bought him a cup of coffee. The second time, it was eleven cents on his account. Again, I bought him coffee and decided he could go the bank and the coffee shop alone the next time.

The 'tale of woe' that he gave generally had to do with what he called The Rug Rats. These were a set of ten year old twins, a boy and a girl, who were as different as night and day, according to the way that he spoke about them.

The twins, supposedly, he had acquired somewhere in his travels. This all seemed to be a bit bizarre, very much like a Charles Dickens kind of a novel, as his story unravelled bit by bit. I never really knew how much of it to believe, but being a very trusting person, I always gave him the benefit of the doubt. If he said his kids were starving, they probably were. If he said that he had to get clothing for them, he probably did.

Sometimes I felt that his yarns were just a little too far fetched, but then who was I to decide what was truth and what was not? I never did get to meet the twins for some reason. He often solicited gifts for them. Whether or not they actually got any of the gifts, who knows? I began to wonder if maybe they were just a figment of his imagination? If he managed to get a box of chocolates, he ate the chocolates right then and there and seldom if ever, offered even one to anyone else. If it was candy, it went into his mouth or into his pocket, never to be seen again.

Part Two: The four o'clock shadow

The Rogue was like a four o'clock shadow. Wherever I went, he followed. Sometimes he stayed right beside me, or fairly close behind me, while at other times he followed at a distance. He was sort of like a lost puppy that was always expecting to be fed. Feeling sorry for him, I often did feed him, because he invariably said that he had forgotten his wallet at home or had lost his money.

He never carried a lunch. When he did have his wallet or money in his pocket, he would buy very expensive treats, like pastries, cake or persians, seldom a sandwich or any kind of proper nourishment. Those special treats, he would eat either with someone else, or by himself, seated in a far corner of the large cafeteria. Quite often at lunch time, he would head out the door to the restaurant across the street. He generally went there alone.

One payday, he followed me very closely, as I went into the bank, just before I started work. I really thought nothing of it, as I was well accustomed to the tag-a-long nature of this character.

Because Christmas was fast approaching and there was a Christmas dinner that I wanted to purchase tickets for, I picked up a twenty dollar bill from the banking machine and stuck it into the change purse in my wallet. He stood there, waited and watched, while I did my transaction and put the money into my wallet.

That particular day, as time went on, The Rogue came closer and closer. While I was busy, I saw a hand reach over and grab a newspaper off my desk. Not saying a word, I reached over and took it back from his desk immediately. That was not about to deter him. He kept getting closer and closer, gliding his chair in close beside mine. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end and moved away from him.

"Where's my twenty?" I asked myself a little later, when I was about to purchase the tickets for the Christmas dinner. "I should have been smarter," I chided myself, as I realized that I would never see that twenty dollars again. I knew exactly where it had gone.

"Going to the Christmas dinner?" The Rogue asked after work, as we were leaving. It was just as if he was fishing for a party invitation, which I might have been crazy enough to offer if the circumstances had been different. I knew that the twenty would have been sufficient to purchase two tickets and he knew it too.

"I was sort of looking forward to it, but it doesn't look like I am going to able to go now. Too bad, because I was thinking about inviting you and the kids," I said without any further explanation, as I quickly walked away from him and headed out the door.

Thieves always have a way of boasting about what they have done, and that is exactly what happened. Monday morning, after the Christmas party, The Rogue boasted about how he had treated his twins to their very first, twenty dollar pizza, complete with all the trimmings for the holiday season.

Supposedly, they had been living with him for about 18 months and he had never had enough money to buy them one before this time. Who was I to say anything, when I knew his kids, if they were real kids at all, probably needed the pizza far more than I needed to attend the Christmas dinner, either alone or with a companion.

I noted a distinct change in The Rogue's behaviour after that day too, as he no longer sat beside me. The person that he went to sit beside, immediately came over and asked me why The Rogue had moved, as he always seemed to be sitting where I sat. I casually mentioned that there was some money that had gone missing from the change purse in my wallet. I told him that I had not reported it to anyone and that I had decided to say nothing, but with the thought in mind, "Ok then, that twenty is the Christmas present for you and your kids."

The serious comment that the other person made left no doubt in my mind. "Thieves grab and run." The distinct absence of The Rogue confirmed his actions. I chuckled later that day though, when he made the suggestion that I should give him the gift that I had just won in a raffle, so that he could give it to one of the twins for Christmas.

"I don't think so; I am keeping this one," I told him in no uncertain terms. In spite of what he had done, I felt like a mean old Scrooge.

What I saw happening was petty crime, something that never really appeared to amount to much of anything, at least in terms of actual dollars and cents. I began to quietly advise those around me to keep an eye on their belongings and several people reported items that had gone missing. I was not really surprised but I really had no proof other than what I had seen. The Rogue was fast and because of that, no one other than myself realized what he was doing, or if they were aware of it, they too said nothing.

Christmas came and went, with The Rogue still filling his pockets or his mouth at every opportunity. One afternoon, I watched him standing beside one of the top management people, graciously greeting the person with a bow, but with one hand swiping chocolates, from a box on the desk of the management person, at the same time.

I was appalled. Candy canes and ornaments disappeared from another desk that had been decorated. Later he boasted to me about how he was decorating his home for the children, describing the same ornaments down to the last detail.

Stealing and boasting, The Rogue continued to do what he knew how to do best, even in the cafeteria. As his coffee was being poured by the waitress, his hand went into the box of granola bars on the counter and from there right into his pocket. He went and sat down at a table and then he had the gall to go back a second time, insisting that he did not have any sugar in his coffee. As the attendant bent over to get him some sugar, another bar went into his pocket.

Part Three: Not again

"Oh no, not again!" I thought to myself, as I heard a young woman's loud voice. "What has The Rogue done now?"

"Someone just stole my coffee," the woman continued. "And not only that, in my brand new
coffee mug too! That was a present that I just received from my youngest son."

I could see that she was visibly upset and on the verge of tears. She went from one area to another looking for it. As she came close to the desk that I was working at, she looked closely at my coffee mug. It contained melting ice and cold water.

"What does it look like?" I asked, trying to help her as best I could, considering the circumstances. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see The Rogue heading out the door with a large, brown, paper bag in his hand.

"It was just like yours but brand new," she stated, continuing to look for it. "And I had just filled it up with coffee. It is has the company logo on it." Mine was at least four years old, but still a good mug.

There was only one other person that I had seen with a mug like mine, but I could not prove that The Rogue had not purchased his somewhere recently. I was rather a co-incidence that he had exited so suddenly with something, as soon as she had raised an alert.

I quietly offered her the change for another cup of coffee, which she graciously declined. "I am so angry with whoever did that! My son will be upset too!"

"The next one that you get,"I suggested, cautiously, as I did not want to upset her further,

"Carve your initials into the lid, like this." I showed the initials on the lid on my old coffee mug.
"I'll never bring another cup to work," she said sadly, heading off towards her desk to begin her day's work.

Incident after incident occurred, but it mostly relatively small items that suddenly disappeared.

I began to wonder if The Rogue was even aware of what he was doing. Almost everytime something went missing, he had been spotted in that area at some time during the day. It seemed to be some sort of an obsessive-compulsive behaviour for him, bordering on what I would call cleptomania. But he was too fast and too smart to get caught, or at least so it seemed.

After all, I had caught him repeatedly.

"The hand is faster than the eye," The Rogue boasted to me one day, as he waved a small Canadian flag in front of me. I was not impressed.

I did not say one word but thought, "Oh, no, another item from the dollar shop." Obviously, he did know that he was stealing or he would not be boasting. I turned away momentarily and saw his hand grab a pen from my desk. "Sorry, I need that," I said to him sternly, as I took it back from his hand. He knew that I was wise to him.

The last time that I saw The Rogue, he was standing outside the bus, like a lost orphan, writing 'Goodbye," in capital letters on the window of the bus. The 'y', he had written backwards. He smiled sadly and waved his Canadian flag as the bus pulled away. I nodded and turned my head. I was really glad to see him go.