Good
gawd, I’m going to die of old age waiting in this line.
Today
my son and I are on a scavenger hunt for storage bins that he can use at
college. This is his senior year, so
durability isn’t a real concern, but price is.
No sense in investing big bucks in something that only needs to last for
nine months, so we end up at Wal-Mart in Salem, NH.
After
picking out three plastic bins and a bath mat (green, so it looks like grass
from the lacrosse field), we go stand in one of the shortest lines. Right here and now, we should realize
something is wrong. Why is this line shorter than the others?
It
doesn’t take long for the answer to become obvious: The cashier is a
chatter. She chats with people after
touching every single item. This is
awesome for people like us, whose items consist of three large bins, a bath
mat, and some assorted toiletries. But
the people two carriages in front of us are also doing their grocery shopping,
and they have yogurt. Lots and lots of
yogurt, all in little individual containers.
Rather
than ringing in the yogurts as a bulk item (you know, scan one item and key in “times
twelve”), the cashier stops to talk as she touches each … and … every … single …
yogurt … container. And it’s not just
the yogurts. She pauses after each item,
scanning, chatting, then slowly putting the items into bags. She repeats this same process probably forty
times while we are all bored and chomping at the bit trying desperately to move
the line forward.
By
the time she gets to our stuff, we put the small items first and push the bins
forward. Any time the belt stops so she
can chit-chat, we push the items forward so she has to keep scanning lest the
items scan themselves.
We
make it out of the line about twenty minutes after we stepped into the shortest
line in the store with the world’s slowest cashier. As we pass by the next few register, a woman
on a cell phone swings her carriage right into my path. My son balks and throws some words her
way. I make a huge gesture with my hand
and start yelling, “Whoa, whoa, WHOA!”
Then loudly enough for her to hear out of the ear that doesn’t have her
phone stuck to it, but quietly enough that she must assume I am not truly
talking to her, I say, “She should get the hell off her cell phone.”
In
the end, I don’t die of old age while waiting in line, but I do come close to
dying from a perforated spleen when I am damn-near attacked by the moronic woman’s
carriage at the check-out. Let this be a
lesson to me – Apparently, Wal-Mart is hazardous to my health.
