I had one of those mornings where for no apparent reason, I feel anxious and panicked. A bit depressed, wondering if after all I have nothing to say. Annoying on a sunny, warm fall day like today. So I decided to do something useful instead of sitting around in a funk: a trip to the grocery store for milk, since we’re almost out. Teenage boys drink an awful lot of milk.
The store was nice and quiet at ten a.m. on a weekday. I got milk and meat, impulse-grabbed the two-for-one Keebler cookie packs–teenage boys like something to soak up the milk, and so do their moms–and pointed my cart towards the cash registers. Two of them were operating. I was aiming towards the register closest to the exit when the guy at the one next to it made eye contact and waved me over. Bad manners to ignore him, I felt, so I headed that way. The cashier had opened his mouth to speak (I’m psychic, so I just knew he was going to say, “how are you doing today, Ma’am?”) when a man pushed in front of my cart, which was two feet away from touchdown, and spiked his carton of deli pasta salad onto the conveyer belt. To get in front of me, he had actually dodged around the candy stand. For his one item that he was perfectly capable of taking to the next register, since it was OPEN!
We’ve all seen plenty of bad behavior in grocery stores. I’ve been known to walk quite quickly or even break into a sort of trot to get to the back of a shorter line, so that I have a chance of getting home before the ice cream melts. I need more than cookies, some days: maybe today, too? I’ve sent my son to wait in the next line over to see if he’ll get to the front before I do. But this seemed like quite the waste of energy, since it would have been easier for this jerk to walk over to the next register.
Come-hither register clerk didn’t speak up for me. I took my cart to the register where I’d been originally headed, feeling miffed. Asshole customer left his pasta salad at the register while he went back to get a spoon from the deli.
One of those days.
the jeanSpace 