Hello....McFly ????

Since it was Thursday, I went grocery shopping. This is a weekly trial that's always more difficult than it seems. Mainly because people turn into complete morons there. Maybe it's something they pump into the air conditioning system. Or maybe not.

Aside from the usual aisle-hogs and human speed bumps, there was only one real incident. Allow me to share.

I got lucky and nabbed an empty checkout line. No sooner did I have four items on the conveyor, a woman appears in line behind me, slams down the plasticky divider thingy and begins emptying her cart, using the entire swath of conveyor - including the area I was using.

So, the conveyor keeps rolling. Little Miz Impatient's groceries float past me, all the way down to the checkout clerk, effectively leaving me with a cartful of groceries and nowhere to put them. At this point, I might as well just hand them one by one to the clerk.

I shove the plastic thingy along with some of her crap back up towards her, and she barely takes notice. She's all blurry arms flying, tossing everything from her cart en masse onto the conveyor. Thankfully, the clerk realizes what happened and stops it from rolling.

My initial reaction was that maybe she wasn't paying attention.

“Excuse me, ma'am.....could you wait til I've finished?” I said.

She just stares at me, then goes back to putting her stuff on the conveyor.

Hello.... McFly !! Bonk bonk....

So I try again. “Ma'am, I still have a cart full of groceries, could you wait til I've finished, please?!?”

No response.

She's looking at me with irritation. I'm motioning to the conveyor and my cart. I swear something behind her eyes stirred with recognition for a split second.

Then she said, “No habla Ingles”.

Really? .....like, really??

Personally, I don't care what language she said it in, or where she comes from. She could come from Germany, Japan, Iceland - or the moon. I don't care. I'm more than sure she's been in a grocery store before.

Maybe I'm just crabby again, but I'm pretty sure not speaking English is not actually an excuse for being a jerk.

Must Be Thursday...

I have to go grocery shopping tonight.

Well, it's not that I have to. There's food in the house. It's just that Thursdays are the only evenings I can get the shopping done with a minimum of aggravation. Plus I'm on call. Even if I wanted to suffer the trauma of a Saturday grocery store run, you can pretty much guarantee a server will implode the moment I queue up in the checkout lane, behind 40 other people.

So yeah. Thursdays.

My local grocery store must be feeling the economic pinch, because they always seem to be restocking at irregular times. I could be wrong about that, after all I don't work in the food business, but I always thought most restocking was done on Wednesdays. Now it seems they're refilling shelves every other day, yet many are still empty. Thursdays are the least barren.

Friday evenings are like open house at the lunatic asylum. Go to any grocery store on a Friday evening and you'll find worn out, lost souls on their way home from work desperately attempting to find something easy for dinner.

For example, our store has great takeout: fresh sushi, fish and chips, pasta bowls, Asian cuisine, even pizza. Visit them on a Friday after 5:00pm and your choices will be limited to a solitary pack of California rolls, and maybe a fried crab ball.

Heh....crab balls.

Saturdays, obviously, are very busy since everyone else had the idea to go that day. The stock boys are restocking - again, and have a palette the size of Greenland parked in the middle of every aisle. Honestly, does anyone really want to waste a perfectly good Saturday on grocery shopping?

Sundays are no good between the hours of 9:00am and 2:00 pm, owing to the after-church crowd. Mondays are, well, Mondays, so I try to avoid any additional stress after work other than cracking open a bottle of red.

Tuesdays are a forgotten day.....I know nothing of Tuesdays at a grocery store. I'm usually still stressed from Monday, and there's often food in the house, so going to the store just doesn't even register.

Wednesdays? Like I said, I always figured this was National Restocking Day, so I've avoided it.

However, there are other things that can make grocery shopping challenging. I really try to be polite and not get in other people's way, pull my cart to the side when I'm looking for something on a shelf, look both ways before blowing out of an aisle, etc. I'm one of the few though.

Invariably, there's always someone stopped dead in the middle of the aisle, catatonic in front of the cheeses. Can't go around - there's not enough real estate, so I wait, five carts deep, while Wallace decides between Wensleydale or Gloucester.

Or there's five long lost friends are having a reunion at an intersection, oblivious to the traffic backing up around them.

Hmmmm. Now that I think about it, I bet there's a direct correlation between how people drive their cars, and how they behave in a grocery store.

Now if I could just get that air horn and rocket launcher mounted on my cart...