A police report in Italy. This one was probably not worth the effort, but I learned interesting things along the way, including something about Italian xenophobia.

On Saturday, November 17, 2007 at 16:24, I purchased a SIM card for my mobile telephone from Telefonando, located at Via Verdi #46 – Rosso, 0122 Firenze. The cost of the card was 10 euros. I gave the clerk a 20 Euro note and waited for my change of ten euros. When I asked him about it after waiting a few minutes, the clerk told me that I have given him a 10 Euro note. I had not seen a 10 Euro note yet (it was my first day in Italy and the currency was not familiar to me), so I did not continue to protest that he had failed to give me appropriate change at that time. When I finally saw a 10 euro note (which is red and smaller than the blue 20 Euro notes), I saw that I could not have possibly confused the two kinds of notes. I went back to the store a couple of days later to reclaim my money, but the clerk refused to give in to me. I returned a couple of days after that to protest to the owner of the shop, but she refused to believe me. The clerk had talked to her in the interval between my second and third visit and told her that I had given him a 20 Euro note and that he had given me 10 euros change. The fact that he told me this I had given him a 10 Euro note, and that that was the reason that he did not return change, and that he told his employer that I had given him 20 euros and he had returned change of ten, strongly suggests that his theft was deliberate and not an honest mistake. Obviously, I will be unable to recover the lost money, because this is a matter of two people giving different versions of the same event. But I feel certain that he deliberately robbed me, and feel certain that if he has done it once he has done it many times. So I am taking the step of making this report so that if there are other reports of his theft, that a precedent will have been established. I will appreciate it if you will call the owner and confront her with the fact that her employee told two different versions of what had happened to me and to her. The telephone number is 055-2638973.