Robbing your own bank

Hit and run accidents, speeding, and burglaries seem to be the most common crimes in the hills we call home.

Nothing as interesting as any random story from the police blotter of a large US city ever happens here. Over at the freeway not too far away, they have the usual mix of traffic snarls and mangled flesh, but from our vantage point, that's TV land.

In the minds of the hill folks, the land beyond the freeway might as well be called Ukraine, or Syria. It's where the others live.

The other day, we were hanging out for a few minutes with the old lady for whom we run the odd errant every once in a while. She asked: have you heard about the robbery?

We had not.

The post office was robbed again. 

Oh.

Post office and gas station robberies are the two big ones in the countryside. These shops don't come with all the bullet proof glass you'd expect from the US. Nor do they have the tiny tubes Italian banks use. Down there, on the other side of the Alpes, banks tend to have glass locks between the entrance and the tellers. You come in, you find yourself in a tube narrower than an economy class plane seat. A pane slides into place behind you, and for a few seconds, you have nowhere to go. Then, a pane in front of you slides to the side with a sad hissing sound, and you are inside the bank.

This contraption must be the real reason for the low obesity rates in Italy. The Mediterranean diet might help, but the air locks at the banks are the real reason for staying slender.

Obese Italian people simply cannot get at their money.

Anyhow, the old lady explained that the post office had been robbed twice during the last twelve months, and now it had happened again.

The woman did it, she laughed.

The woman?

The young woman who runs it.

All three robberies had taken place when the clerk opened the shop. The first time, she had been held up by a masked bandit with a gun, the second time, by and individual with a knife.
This time around, there had been two men, who had apparently waited outside her apartment, grabbed her as she walked out to open the post office, forced her to open the safe, taken her with them as a hostage to their car and let her go as they sped off.

None of it was true.

After the second robbery, the owners of the 1 Euro store that doubled as the small twon post office had moved the store into an empty grocery store not far from the original, somewhat isolated, location.
The former grocery store was deemed a safer location, although it struggled to stay open.

Every six months or so, some new entrepreneur restarted the grocery store, only to shut down because they could not compete with the two supermarkets on the outskirts of town.

The post office was the only tenant for a while, until a new owner decided to give it another go as a grocery store.

That's how the young lady tripped up.

On the morning of the third robbery, some workers had shown up early to stack shelves for the grand opening of what we assume will be called Another Doomed Grocery Store. Be that as it may, the police talked to the workers, explained our old lady, and they all said that the young woman postal worker had been alone all morning.

This time, the police had not called in the friendly folks from Victim Support, and the twenty something young adult had confessed.

The intriguing aspect of all of this was not gall, greed, or motives though.

It was the laugh of the old lady.

It felt neither malicious nor condescending but -- well -- wise.

Like an acknowledgement of the sheer hilarity of life itself by a woman just shy of her 100th birthday.