Greg got robbed on Wednesday. Within 20 minutes, the thief had spent about $500 of our money. By Friday morning, the thief was apprehended, our money was returned and punishment was doled out. The thief never met us, and we never met the thief. Sound like one of those lateral thinking riddles? Nope, just the way life is these days in the faceless time of computers, cameras and online banking.

Here’s what happened. Greg was out of state on business on Wednesday afternoon and dropped into a mini-mart for a snack on his way back to the airport. When he had driven on for a while, he realized that he had left his wallet back at the store and that he wasn’t going to have time to double back and retrieve it. He called the mini-mart with precise instructions where he’d left it, but they said it wasn’t there. Greg has been through things like this before and doesn’t monkey around with lost cards — he called me and told me to call and have the debit card and another credit card shut off.

For those of you who have never been through this, there’s two things you need to know:

1. You’ve got 24-hour access, and the cards get shut off in an instant. If the US Post Office could act as quickly as a major financial institution that detects fraud, you’d get your mail in 45 minutes rather than two days.
2. They’ll recompensate you for the loss. I’m always surprised that they’ll just take your word for it, but they do. So we were never worried that we would lose the money permanently.

All the same, when I went to the bank online to get the phone number, I checked our account activity, and there it was: A $7.92 withdrawal (Greg’s snack), followed by a $31 charge, a $100 charge and a $211 charge, all within the same mini-mart.

I’ve never been robbed in person — thank God — but I’ve heard people say that the feelings of violation are the hardest part to recover from. In this case, with the robbery occurring in this anonymous way, I felt only a muted version of the same thing. I think I just sat there looking at those numbers for a minute. Here’s a person that doesn’t know us, doesn’t know anything about us, doesn’t know what we can afford and what struggles we have, and yet is willing to deal us this kind of blow — nearly $350. Do they know how many times in our married lives Greg and I had the household in virtual lockdown for want of $350 or less?

The answer is no, of course. You can’t take it personally; things like this are completely impersonal crimes. But that’s why they seem even more insulting somehow.

And I was also left to ponder the weirdness of the behavior. After I shut off the debit card, I called the credit card — $12.95, spent at the same mini-mart. When Greg shut off the other card, there was a $108 charge at the same mini-mart. This person spent almost $475 at the same mini-mart. Holy flippin’ cow. What kind of Slurpees do they sell there, the ones that come in a bathtub? Did they clean out all the Ding Dongs and Chili Fritos? Who the heck decides to go on a spree with stolen credit cards and never leaves the mini-mart?

The answer didn’t come to me until the next morning. Of course. Someone who works there, because they can’t leave. By the time they could’ve left and gone someplace where they could spend real money, the cards had been turned off. Greg hadn’t thought of it yet, but once I mentioned it, it was so obvious that he called the mini-mart.

And he didn’t have to lay out very much of the story before they got the picture completely. It probably helped that Greg wasn’t irate or demanding his money back. (By the way, Greg is unfailing — almost unnaturally — calm and charming at times like that, and you would not believe how helpful everyone is. That’s the reason he always makes these calls. I quickly disintegrate into babbling, fussing and being enraged, and people can’t wait to get me off the phone.)

So they were good enough to call us back with the end of the story yesterday. It didn’t take long to figure out who had done it. It was never really a very smart crime, probably just something that seemed like a golden opportunity to someone who was a bit fuzzy on the whole “Thou shalt not steal” thing. Once they sat her down in the little room, showed her the tally of charges rung up on that card and contrasted that with some pertinent facts — the $100 charge was for gift certificates, which she had been so injudicious as to flaunt the next day — AND capped it off with the store video showing her picking up the wallet … welllll, you could be a stupid thief, but you’d have to have an IQ in the low twenties not to know that the jig was up.

She was fired, of course. The thing that I didn’t expect was that they also prosecuted the matter with the police. I feel kind of bad about that, seeing that we weren’t out the money, but then I realized that the store really had to do that. Whether the $475 was gone or not, an employee of theirs stole from a customer. It’s their issue as much as it is ours.

So there it is: the big capper at the end of our robbery, and we wouldn’t know this person if we passed her in the street tomorrow (though we’re not likely to. She lives in another state.) She might know Greg, if she had bothered to look at his driver’s license, but I imagine she probably didn’t. I would think it would be easier to rob from him if he was faceless. And maybe it’s easier for me to feel some grim satisfaction because she’s faceless. I’d like to think that it’s all for the best, that whether it was just a momentary lapse or another in a series of bad decisions, this peccadillo will have a better lasting effect on her ultimately because she got caught.

But we’ll never know. She robbed from us, we got her fired, and we don’t even know each other.

What a world.