Your Collection Is Purely Symbolic

(I work at a 24 hour pharmacy/convenience store. We use scanner guns, or ‘symbols,’ to locate items, determine inventory, etc. Our store has five symbols, and while I’m very careful not to leave mine unattended, as my manager has told me not to many times in the past, some of the other employees are a bit blasé about it. One day I’m taken off register to start hanging sale signs. I notice the girl who has replaced me on register left her symbol on a stock cart in an aisle, so I pick it up and put it on my sign cart, not wanting to leave it unattended. I see another abandoned cart with a symbol, this one belonging to my supervisor who had gone up ten or fifteen minutes earlier to help a customer. I do the same with this one, as I figured he would be a while and he could just grab it back from me later. I see yet ANOTHER symbol left in a crate of stock that a coworker had been working on before her shift ended. I grab that one, too, and finish up my signs. I head up front to throw away some trash, and bump into my supervisor. At this point I have four of the five symbols our store has on my cart.)

Supervisor: *looks at the symbols, then at me* “Wha…?”

Me: “I’ve been collecting.”