My mind is a sponge. At least, that's what my preschool teacher once told me. I'm sure that if I hadn't been trying to reach that pretty dollhouse on the top shelf of the playroom--what?--I would have started weeping at the sheer profundity of her words. A sponge: capable of absorbing vast amounts of knowledge, ever growing. What she failed to mention is, however, like any other sponge, my mind gets periodically squeezed, and most of what I have recently absorbed runs down the drain mixed with pubes and dandruff.
There are times when I feel that each day I get stupider. Occasionally I'll look back at something I did in high school or my first year of college and think, "Damn!" I'll compare it to some of the drivel I've turned in more recently and think, "Damn!" See the difference? The first 'damn' is one of impressitude. The second is more of a depressed 'damn', depressed at how far my mind seems to have slipped. Weird. Maybe I cared more back in the day--yore, I like to call it. Or maybe retarded people have been slipping into my room while I sleep, siphoning off any higher-level brain function I once had.
I suppose becoming idiotic is natural; it seems very much part of the human condition. The true extent of the soaring heights of human intelligence is most visible to me while I work as a scan whore at my local grocery store. I watch people buy shit. I watch fat people buying Coke and donuts, and I wonder if they get home and claim that their problems are genetic or stem from having a thyroid just like Oprah's. I watch poor people eat better than I could ever afford to, simply because the government thinks food stamps should cover sliced organic vegetables and filet mignon. I watch as people stare at the screen and stare, certain that the simple act of not blinking will lower the prices they see. Sometimes, in a fit of Harry Potterness, they cock their heads--because sometimes staring isn't enough. If neither of those works, they'll complain to me about the 30 cents I am apparently quite intent on 'stealing' from them. After a good five years in retail, let me just say this: the customer is rarely, if ever, right.
I'd totally stop complaining here, but I'm totally me, so I'm totally going to type out an anecdote or two. The first one happened a few days ago. Check with Jesus if you're not sure on the date; he's got it in his creepy I-watch-you-sin-and-shower Hell Diary. I'd check with him but I'm already in bed and getting off my mattress atop a plank and situating myself in a prone position with my knees grinding into my hard-as-diamonds yet somehow still mildewy carpet sounds like, well, difficult right now. I'll stay in bed. Anyway, I get a lot of old people through my line, especially during the summer. Why would there be old people in a college town? Well, when all the college fucks move out for the summer, we invite old fucks--whose 'fuck' has been incubating for years in the fecund Arizona air--to temporarily take their places until the younger fucks move the fuck back up here to get drunk, study and fuck.
I say all this because it just so happened that there was an old dude in my line. Now, I've gotten really good at pretending to care about social niceties, so when someone chooses not to pretend to care back, I get a little peeved. Old people are really good at this. Entering their twilight years, they assume--unless they're talking to us young'uns about Depression-era moldy potato casserole or shootin' gooks in 'Nam--that they should just be curmudgeon-y turds. This older gentleman chose the turd option. He comes through my line and, instead of vocalizing his pleasure at seeing me, chooses to stick his store savings card in my face instead of using words. Now, if this is some kind of ancient greeting he learned in a peyote-induced syphilis exchange in a wigwam, then I apologize now for my rudeness to him. I had no idea of the nature of his historic salutation. At the time, however, I took his lack of verbosity as a slight against me and my tenuous treaty with etiquette. So I mumbled under my breath and scanned his stuff, taking note of particular items (some people get hemorrhoids) and crushing others (bread is surprisingly soft). I told him his total; he took out his checkbook. Surprise. As he proceeded to write the check, I sat down on the back of my register and watched. Something was most definitely amiss. But what? Oh, he was writing his damn check on that little plastic divider to keep your duplicate checks from getting a bit too duplicative.
At this point, I figured it might be nice to say something. Then I remembered that this particular patron had also had a chance in which it would have been nice to have said something. The man wasn't hard of hearing, by the way; he had plenty to say when he thought I was overcharging him and plenty of responses when I explained his wrongness. Correctly guess the outcome here and something magical will happen. The correct answer: I let him write out his entire damn check on that little plastic thing. I let him look up at me with chagrin. I let him get a glimpse of my insanely genuine empathy smile. Finally, I let him fill out another check, this time on paper. Ahhhhh, small victories.
Next: here's a little tale that I doubt even I could spin into a ridiculously overlong yarn. Here goes. Today, a man asked me for his receipt. There it is. Seems fairly innocuous, right? Well, here's the deal. When you buy something at a store, you get a receipt. The sun rises; the sun sets. Engineers build tall buildings; people fall out of them. You buy an item; you collect proof, in paper form, of your purchase. Truths of life. So when I spend each and every one of my working hours helping people buy shit and handing them receipts it's a bit insulting to be asked to do something I do literally hundreds of times per day. Honestly, my job takes one day of training to learn. There's no apprenticeship. There's no magical Cashier-Merlin to guide you. One day, someone who's worked at the store for most of her life tells you what all the little buttons on the keypad mean. The next day, you use those buttons. Factoid: I had my special training day (and my first period, er . . .) three years ago. The absolute last thing I need is someone asking me to do one of the most basic aspects of my Mcjob.
He asks for the receipt. I give it to him dazedly and respond, "Uhhhhh, we always give receipts for purchases." Eloquent, I know. He says, "Well, sometimes they don't give it to me." Mmmmmhmmmm. I've run into 'they' before. Not the general 'they' that seem to spout scientific facts and statistics. No, those of us involved in creating a world-class front end experience for our customers have a special 'they'. This 'they' is a bunch of mentally retarded, one-armed, and possibly rabid cashiers that give the rest of us a bad name. 'They' are the ones who can't distinguish between customers' orders, causing our beloved patrons to gently place dividers in front of each and every order even if there's nothing else on the belt. I guess this haphazard divider-placing would make sense if fucking ghosts had to shop for invisible merchandise. But since ghosts still remain segregated, unconstitutionally, I feel, from the general populace let me say this: DON'T put those damn dividers on my conveyor belt. I'm not one of 'them'. I can tell the goddamn difference. Wow, soapbox. . .
Wow, I really suck at being succinct. I guess the point of this receipt tale is twofold. First, don't belittle a cashier unless he/she proves he/she really deserves it he/she (just threw that last he/she in there for good measure; appease the feminists and whatnot). Second, don't toss the idiosyncrasies of 'they' upon me. 'They' tend to work at Wal-mart. I'm not some kind of Messiah for 'them', so don't act surprised if I'm somewhat less than graceful when someone tries to push 'their' sins onto me.
Ok, now I'm going to be truly concise for once, summarizing this entire post in just a few sentences. Everyone, including myself, is stupid some, or all, of the time. People are rude, and karma will give them the old prison rape--in fact, waiting for my cosmic soap to drop just after writing this post. Finally, don't belittle your scan whore while you shop or you may find your bread smashed, chips crushed, bananas bruised or, even worse, you may find that you've been typed about behind your back.
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