"If they can't kill you. . . they'll make you crazy."

A week ago Friday, I decided to have some new business cards made up at Staples. Dropping off the image, I was told that they would be ready Saturday morning. So, after I left the AGCA gun show early to visit with my daughter Zoe before she returned to college, about mid-day on the way home I stopped by to pick them up.

I observed to the counter guy that it looked like the whole order wasn't there. He told me that someone had asked to see the order earlier representing himself as my "business partner" and had taken a few, saying that I wouldn't mind.

Uh, huh. Of course, I have no business partner and no one knew that I had ordered the cards but me and Staples. The description of the "guy in a suit and sunglasses" was sufficiently vague and I had to get going to see my daughter off so I didn't immediately demand to see the manager and the surveillance tapes. In retrospect, David Codrea, among others, has beat me up about this and he and they are probably right.

In any case, there are a couple of explanations for this latest nudge of the elbow from the secret police, one more innocent than the other. The least threatening one is that some gestapoman either got bored enough (or was told) to "count coup" on me to rattle my cage. The other is that they were looking for "evidence" to plant somewhere later on somebody -- at a crime scene or on a dead criminal for example.

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