Simply put, and there’s no way to sugarcoat this, my wife is a thief. She steals stuff. She takes what she wants. She has no regard for ownership. She doesn’t care about property rights. She will stoop so low as to even steal from our children. It’s completely shameless.
It’s not a charming thing, like she’s stealing kisses or something cute and cuddly like that. She steals actual stuff, real items, from her actual family, continuously, and she is completely unapologetic about it. Why hasn’t she been locked up yet, you ask? Well, it’s complicated.
The fact is she only steals one thing and it doesn’t exactly amount to a felony. Her only victims are her immediate family, and her heinous crime is she steals cellphone chargers. Unfortunately, the kids and I haven’t found a court in the land that will take the case.
Sadly, the real sufferers in all this are the children. It’s the poor kids who get their cellphone chargers ripped off by their mom and they don’t have any legal recourse. If they try to give her grief about it she immediately pulls the Mom card. “I carried you for nine months and gave birth to you. I think you can find it in your heart to lend me your charging cord,” she will say. The kids fold every time and hand over the cord in shame. There’s a 50/50 chance they will never see the cellphone cord again. My wife has recently “lost” more than seven phone chargers. I can only assume the dog is burying them in the backyard somewhere.
In most cases, she doesn’t ask the kids if she can “borrow” the charger prior to her losing it. She just does whatever she wants. The kids will leave their phone on a table connected to the wall, charging. They will come back later and find their phone unplugged and their mom’s phone plugged into their charger. If my wife sees a phone on a charger she will look to see at what percentage the battery is charged. If it’s 1 percent higher than hers, as in 19 percent versus 18 percent, she makes the selfish decision to unplug that phone and plug hers in.
I probably wouldn’t care if my wife actually answered a single phone call I’ve ever made to her. But she doesn’t take calls. She makes calls, when she wants to, and in most instances she doesn’t want to make any calls. She just wants to trade text messages with her cousin as the two compare whose husband has more back hair. Spoiler alert: It’s not her cousin’s husband.
Luckily for me, I’m completely unaffected by most of this cord nonsense. I found a loophole in the system when I refused to become an Applephile and join the hordes of other Steve Jobs followers by purchasing an overpriced iPhone. I didn’t drink the Apple-flavored Kool-Aid. You see, I’m an Android man, and proud of it.
So when my wife’s cellphone dies (because of too many texts about back hair), I can’t lend her my charger. The reason I can’t help her is because the Android phones use a different cord than Apple phones. For the record, Android uses a standard micro USB charging connector like most every electronic gadget on the planet. Apple’s charging cable setup (which comes at a ridiculously inflated Apple price) only plugs into other high-priced Apple products. Unfortunately for my children, who are die-hard Apple lovers, they are fair game to have their cellphone chargers borrowed (read: stolen) by dear ol’ mom.
For years I wasn’t paying much attention to this problem, because it really wasn’t my problem, until we took a family trip and were staying in a hotel room together. I was relaxing on the bed thinking about where we should go for dinner (my vote was ice cream for dinner) when I heard my kids fighting with each other.
“Where is my charger? You took it!”
“I didn’t take it!”
“You do this all the time. I need to charge my phone. Give it to me!”
“No. This charger is mine and you can’t borrow it!”
Things escalated quickly, faces were red, voices were raised, and I wasn’t able to relax anymore on vacation. “What is the problem, you two?”
“She took my cellphone charger.”
“I didn’t. He didn’t pack one and he wants to use mine, but I’m using it.”
“I did pack one, and she stole it!”
I had enough of that nonsense, “OK, both of you take your phones and flush them down the toilet. Now nobody needs a charger because nobody has a cellphone anymore. Problem solved, let’s get ice cream.”
After a bit of parenting via sarcasm, my wife, whom I love, emerged from the hotel bathroom holding her cellphone with a suspicious wire dangling from it. She didn’t join the conversation. She just sat down on the bed, plugged in her phone to a socket using stolen property, and went back to texting her cousin about my back hair. The kids and I just stared at her.
“Honey, did you take that charger from one of the kids?”
My wife never looked up from her screen, “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so? Or no, you definitely brought your own charger with you on this trip?”
Again she didn’t look up from her phone, “I don’t know.”
“Well, according to our kids, it’s the crime of the century in this hotel room right now and it would be really great if you could let us know where the charger came from.”
She finally looked up from her phone and bluntly said, “It came from the Apple Store.”
Spoken like a true thief. Never admit you’re guilty.
The milk cartons in the Krider refrigerator have photos of iPhone cords with the words “Have You Seen Me?” underneath. You can read more from Rob Krider or contact him at robkrider.com.
This article appears in Mar 10-17, 2016.