Secondhand skate scam foiled

I guess there really is no such thing as the perfect crime.

After years of studying glamorous criminals and years of watching heist films like the original Ocean’s 11 and gateway crime glorification like Law and Order I attempted my very first criminal heist on Sunday.

It was genius, I dressed like an suburban Ottawa mother of two and even had the foresight to bring an extra 10 year old child with me for cover. Adding to the authenticity of our Winterludian image we parked in the free World Exchange Plaza and blended in with the crowd perfectly as we made our way to the ice sculptures at Confederation Park. Here we perfected the zoned out look of a family group pleasantly entertained by observing tricky looking see through sculptures and eating Beavertails.

Of course when embarking on a blatant daylight criminal masterpiece the details are extraordinarily important. For realism I actually left my wallet at home and only brought cash. See, I actually acted as if I was someone who had been skating on the canal before who didn’t want to be loaded down by cards and wallets and also at the mercy of those lesser, common or garden criminals, the dull witted pickpocket.

For extra authenticity my 11 year old daughter left her skates in her friend Jada’s parent’s car. It was a detail that we debated over the many months of planning this obviously took. You see we eventually decided to employ the Stanislavsky method of acting here because we wanted our merry criminal prank to contain a little artistic realism. We cunningly chose her birthday weekend in order to lean on heart strings if necessary. It’s the maxim many of us criminal masterminds know and rely on, people are such gullible fools.

But wait, I had not, on my many rehearsals of the time lines, pouring over blueprints by flashlight in the garden shed, taken into account the sheer officiousness of an Ottawa skate shack employee. I had forgotten that the icy chill of bureaucracy seeps down from the highest crevices reaching its chill  through dripping relentlessness to the smallest of transactions in this frozen-hearted town.

In short, I was thwarted, my insanely cunning plan to abscond with a pair of skates used by 75 other people’s sweaty tweaked feet was stonewalled.  Was I trying to get them for free? No, I had the 32 dollars necessary to liberate them from their dank cage on the pretense of borrowing them with a helmet for two hours.

It was because I had neither a credit  card on me nor the $50 deposit necessary on top of the exorbitant rental fee. No amount of wailing or heartfelt pleading gesturing at the children (who had perfected their wide-eyed astonishment at this turn of events) would move those teenage hearts. Even the manager couldn’t be swayed and merely looked at me with disgust as I offered him my car keys as a deposit.

I was deflated. I was beaten. They had won.

My collection of size 4 used skates remains at nil and there will forever be an empty space of my mantelpiece that will daily remind me of my failure. The ones that got away.