We're gonna' get some satisfaction down at the Grocery Store

Yesterday I stepped over a used condom to get into my local grocery store. A portent of things to come.

Sidebar. There was also a used prophylactic in the middle of the isle I had to walk down for my high school graduation. And there was one in the toilet when I moved into my dorm freshman year of college. AND there was one on my windshield when I lived in our Nation’s capital (George Bush had just been elected. Coincidence, or hard proof that we had all just gotten fucked?) Now all my friends tell me weird condom stories that they either see or hear about from all over the country. People I haven’t spoken to in years will e-mail me out of the blue with subject lines like "Purple cum sock stuck to the bottom of my shoe!" Feel free to add your own condom stories to the comments section. For a blog, this has far too few random digressions. Let’s remedy that shall we? Whoever has the best used condom story will win one of the books, DVDs or CDs I’ve been meaning to get rid of for the past few months. Winner to be determined based on my own inscrutable criteria. Good luck!

Anyway it started off rather uneventfully. I picked up my weekly supplies and headed for check out. It was remarkably uncrowded so I had the completely absurd notion that I might get out with everything in a reasonable amount of time. There was one person in front of me with about half a cart full of groceries. The cashier was displaying what my general manager at Wendy’s my senior year of high might have described as a lack of urgency in going about her job. She was scanning and packing and chatting with the cashier next to her. I don’t know what they were talking about as the Peter Cetera classic "Glory of Love" had just come on over the speaker system, so I was cool. Somewhere around "Like a knight in shining armor from a long time ago-o" she started the process of checking me out. All was going well until she got to my eggs. Now I buy eggs in the half dozen cartons, because I am the only person in my house who eats them, and I don’t even eat them all that often. Twelve is far too many for me. It’s not the money; I just don’t want them moldering in my refrigerator for weeks at a time after I forget about them. So the cashier couldn’t get a price on my six eggs so she called the manager over. My trip to the store immediately went to hell.

The cashier asked the manager to get a price check. The manager asked me to buy the twelve pack instead. I unwisely got into the whole half dozen vs. dozen eggs thing, which did little more than piss off the people behind me. Though in my defense I really do feel that I should be able to buy whatever is for sale in the store without input from the manager, particularly when her advice was offered for no reason other than to make her life a little easier. So the manager finally calls for a price check and wanders off to chat with another cashier. Meanwhile my cashier whips out her cell phone and starts to beep out a text message. I saw no movement to actually get the price of my eggs. After about thirty seconds of this nonsense the people behind me were growing restless, and even I was beginning to hate me. So I told the cashier to forget the eggs. She held up her finger and asked me to "Hang on." I could only gawk until she finally sent her text message. She ran the total, and as I swiped my card, she told the manager to cancel the price check. The manager, still babbling about bullshit with her friend, looked up and said not to worry about it, because it appeared that whomever she called for the price check had forgotten about actually doing it. Nice. If I had been adamant about buying those eggs then and there, I’d probably still be on line. Not that any of the employees would notice. Apparently they’re all busy with other things.

As I walked out I walked right in front of the manager as she was getting her picture taken by another manager. With a cell phone. Hard at work obviously.

I stepped over the used condom again on my way out.