The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Maybe I’m preaching to the choir, that, or just venting my irritation lately about my weekly shopping trip to the local chain grocery store. Quite awhile back my store put in automated checkout stations, something you might think is a good idea during the Pandemic plague era, protect the employees, protect you. Course, if you have a full shopping cart like I always do, that self check is problematic, items spilling over off the weigh-in platform, the time it takes to look up my broccoli, weigh it, decide if it’s organic, c’mon, I have to get home the same day and cook the damn stuff.

So naturally I gravitate to the lines where the human being says hello and moves my stuff three times faster than I ever could on the automated line. The trouble is, my store has decided in its apparent cost-cutting profit model to keep the check-out personnel to a minimum. Last week I got lucky, only one shopper ahead of me. Course, she had a cart loaded to the ceiling and to make it more nightmarish, she hauled out a wad of coupons gleaned from her newspaper ads, a guarantee of a long wait for all of us behind her.

To make my torture positively fiendish, she and the checker knew each other so it was a fine time to catch up on the happenings in each other’s life. For minutes at a time the checkout would stop, the gossip continue, the line behind me grow more agitated, me growing hot under the collar and finally time just stopped. Completely. Call Einstein, time had ended! I jerked my cart out of the cattle chute, went over to the self check and yeah, time started once again. Very slow, very very slow.

Yesterday I got behind another semi-truck load of groceries, the only check out aisle with a human, no bagger, and once again, call the ghost of Einstein, time stopped. And I swear to god, then it started to reverse itself. I was back in the line I’m always in, the one with no bagger, a yakking checker, a cart with a year’s supply of groceries and a fistful of coupons. And you know, you know as sure as you know the Big Bang theory, just before it’s your turn, just as you’ve started to move forward, the customer will ask for a rain check on that item she had a coupon for but was out of stock. Oh yeah, the Big Bang is going to happen all over again. When my head explodes….

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