I bought a Logitech Wireless Combo keyboard with mouse at Walmart Saturday night.  (It is 20 inches or 51 centimeters long.  That is why it took three pictures to show the box.)  I paid for it in the Electronics Department and was about to exit the store when a security guard and Walmart employee confronted me.

“Have you got the receipt for the items you bought?” asked the security guard.

The security guard was young enough to be my great great great-grandaughter.  She was brown.  I mention her colour because I suspect it was the reason she stopped me.

“Is there a problem?”  I asked.  “Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” she said.  “We do random checks on customers.”

This was the third “random check” I have had at the Walmart in the Dufferin Mall.  Each time it was a different brown security guard asking to see the receipt.

We hear how white people are racist.   Recently, the only racism I have experienced has not come from white people.   It has come from brown people.  Ol’ Gandhi was a racist.

Racism is not a white-people problem; it’s a PEOPLE problem.

I handed her the receipt and said that I bought a wireless keyboard with a mouse.  She looked at the receipt and said, “It says that you bought a mouse.”

“It’s a keyboard with a mouse,” I said.

“No,” she said.  “The receipt says that you only bought a mouse.”

It took me a while to get the keyboard box out because I had extra-bagged it to protect it from the snowstorm going on.

While I was removing the extra bags from the keyboard box, the security guard turned to the Walmart employee and asked, “What does KB mean?”

“I don’t know,” said the employee.

“See?” I said when I finally got the keyboard box out of the bag.  “It’s a keyboard with a mouse.”

The security guard glanced at the keyboard box and turned to the Walmart employee and asked, “Do they sell keyboards with mice?”

“I don’t know,” said the Walmart employee, who was also a young young woman, but she was white.  “Check the UPC number on the receipt with the one on the box.”

Me holding a box with the words WIRELESS COMBO  Full-size keyboard with mouse AND pictures of a keyboard and a mouse on it was not good enough.  The security guard needed to be sure that I had not bought a mouse and was trying to steal a keyboard.

She checked the barcode on the box with the number on the receipt.  The numbers matched!    What a coincidence!

She handed the receipt back to me.  For the first time, I looked at the receipt and saw the KB on it.  I said to the security guard, “The KB stands for keyboard.”

“Ohhhhhhhh,” she said.

I knew right then and there that the security guard was well on her way to becoming the next Sherlock Holmes.

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-34265882