Why do they do it? What is the point?

Imagine the scene if you are that way disposed. If you have a visual imagination that is. If you don’t then I’m sure you can dredge up a memory and alter the dramatis personae sufficiently to recreate the scene with a fair degree of accuracy. Those who can do neither must just read on in mental silence and let the blackness in their mind get on with whatever it was doing before I introduced such alien concepts in what is already a pretentious introduction to a column which could never live up to the hype.

The scene is a club of some kind. Preferably a night club but it could be any place where men and women, men and men, women and women and anyone else who wishes to define a new sexuality for the purposes of securing a local government grant go to meet in an atmosphere of shared oxygen and swallowing highly taxed toxins.

"Here’s my number" said Person A, keen that contact should be perpetuated with Person B. A piece of paper is taken out and a biro, complete with metal effect plastic chain and the partially rubbed off word "Barclays" along its body, is used to scribble what is nowadays and fifteen or twenty digit incantation. Person B takes the number and cherishes it.

Now would this happen? Would someone really take a stolen bank biro out and write their telephone number on a sexually motivated scrap of paper? I think not. There are no circumstances where a stolen biro can impress anyone.

SO WHY DO PEOPLE STEAL THEM?

They are not good pens. They barely write. Admittedly most of the people who steal them can barely write but that isn’t really the point. The point is that I was slightly inconvenienced today and someone must feel my pain.

I was sent a cheque by Lloyds TSB’s share dealing arm this past week for the massive sum of a two pounds and seven pence. It was the balance left over when my sharesave account was converted into shares in The Old Company. Shares which literally and, without a word of an exaggerated lie, fell over ten percent between me sending off my application and me receiving my share certificate. I was eager to sell them and break my last link with The Old Place but a two pounds per share profit and a one pound per share profit are two entirely different sides of the same important coin. Or something.

So I go into the secure vestibule of the bank where the three cash machines and one paying in machine live. They are available 24 hours a day. There are paying in slips, paying in envelopes, no human beings (obviously, as it is Sunday and not even banks are that evil yet) but only pen holders where previously pens had lived. So no pen means no paying in of tiny cheque which means a waste of the two and a half minutes it took to make the door of the vestibule accept the card that I swiped a zillion times to gain entry.

There can’t even be the sense of pride in having stolen a trophy. The standard "hilarious" student practice of taking traffic cones has some kind of merit to it. Equally taking pens from work is pretty much considered as valid as taking a day’s holiday or pretending to be your voicemail service when someone you don’t like rings up and demands to speak to you. Biros they may be but they are at least working biros and not biros which are lumbered with little chains and, let’s be honest, like pub peanuts bank biros probably have trace of urine and faecal matter on them. They aren’t called the unwashed peasantry for nothing.

So what is the point in taking a pen from a bank? It cannot be humorous, it cannot be for pride, it can’t be pecuniary or to impress someone so we are left with only three motives.

1. They are cunts who want to inconvenience people. This is obviously the most likely one as an increasing number of people just are like that.

2. Theft has ceased to be "I will only steal when there is a reason to steal" and has become "I will steal unless there is a reason not to steal".

3. They are anti-capitalist revolutionaries who have calculated how many pens it will take before the entire Western banking system collapses and we are returned to a simpler agricultural economy where the air is clean and people use bicycles to get around.

Frankly I think it’s a mixture of all three although mainly the first two. The third point, though admirable, is flawed because unless a system of recycling the pens is introduced, the capitalist machine’s power will simply switch from the high street banks to the pen manufacturers and, once the pen manufacturers reach a certain economic status, they will open their own banks like Tesco did and the cycle of overdraft charges and that bloody Halifax tosser will continue.

But, dreams of revolution aside, I think we really have become a society where more and more people see theft and vandalism designed to inconvenience people as an acceptable form of entertainment. This isn’t a morality piece about whether it is ok to steal pens from work. That at least as a purpose. The taking of pens from banks serves no positive function what so ever.

BASTARDS.