Author: Allegra

This happened in Toronto, more than 20 years ago.

A friend of mine had a daughter who worked at an answering service (remember those?) in the same building as a parole office. She left the office door open for cross ventilation because the building was rather stuffy and they could actually open windows. There were two women on shift at time. Their desks both faced the door.

As it happened, the open door was situated directly in front of a fire hose cabinet. The women watched in astonishment as a man on his way to the parole office stopped in front of their open door, looked up and down the hallway, and then carefully stashed his bag of pot in the firehose cabinet. Miraculously, the phone in the office didn’t ring while he was standing in front of the door. He then went to his appointment.

One of the women, who was vehemently opposed to pot use, got up from her desk, got the bag, flushed the contents down the john, threw out the bag, and sat back down at her desk. A few minutes later Mr. Stupid Criminal came down the hall, opened the firehose cabinet, and went wtf? He looked up the hall, he looked down the hall. He never once looked through the open door at his back, while the two women, purple from suppressed laughter, got a thirty second demonstration of the cognitive skills that had him visiting a parole office in the first place.