You're not Subtle

Mrs Schwartz and I went to lunch yesterday. She is still recovering from her surgery. We went to a bar near my house. It's the closest thing to a NE neighborhood bar around here. It's dark, not too sports-oriented. The bartender's cool and pretty hot.
This bar also has, I suspect, the same drug trafficking that one finds in most bars. It's pretty easy to spot the deal going down, in fact, that's one of the fun things about going to this bar; the people-watching.

Generally, when you've been up for a couple days, you think you're being subtle, but you're not. Here are a few tips for the public:

1. Buy a friggin drink already. There's nothing more obvious than a guy sitting at a table in a bar who's not drinking or eating anything.
2. Stop looking around so much. You're just giving yourself away. Guess what? If the cops are watching you, you're pretty much done already.
3. Don't try to be Mr Cloak and Dagger. Don't try to slip the guy money in some David-Copperfield-slight-0f-hand sort of way. Just hand him the money. People give each other money all time, whether pitching in for drinks or paying off a bet they lost. When you try to be sneaky, you just look like you're doing something illegal.
4. Guys don't go to the bathroom together. Having one of you go 30 seconds before the other one, doesn't fool anybody.
5. If you have enough brains to go to the bathroom seperately, go the extra mile and space it out a little. Having one guy come back from the bathroom, sit down, and then 10 seconds later, after an obvious hand off, guy number 2 gets up and goes to the bathroom, isn't fooling anybody. Sit and drink your beer. The coke's not going anywhere.
   

Yesterday, Mrs Schwartz decided to fuck with the guys passing drugs. I don't know why she enjoys this so much. These particular geniuses brought in a Van Halen dvd to pass the drugs around in. I'm not kidding. They couldn't be any more obvious. Who carries around a Van Halen dvd?

After they violated every one of the tips above, one of them sets the dvd case on the table, and guy#2 comes over and puts his hat over it. So Mrs Schwartz turns 90 degrees, so she's looking right at them. They all panic, mess with the case for a second and walk away from the table. One of the guys actually banged his beer bottle on the table and said "Fuck" as they left the table, to go sit at another table away from the Van Halen case. The case sits on the table for a while. Mrs Schwartz is nagging me to go over and pick it up. "What are they going to, claim it?" I have more of a live-and-let-live attitude, so I don't, although, I make a point of stopping at the table and looking at it on my way to the bathroom. The whole time, the table full of guys is across the room, not knowing what to do.

This went on as we finished our meal. One of the guys kept his eye on us the whole time, by watching our reflection in a mirror. Very sneaky. I get up to pay the tab and go to the bathroom. When I come out, I can't find Mrs Schwartz. Finally I see her. She had gotten up and walked over, to stand right in front of the table of paranoid drug-takers, and was watching a game on the tv that was over their booth. I collected her up and she went on about how panicked they were the whole time. She finds this kind of thing fun.