Thursday, December 22, 2011
Hitting the Wal
I'm back at my parents' house for the holiday. They never have any of the food that I eat on hand, so I had to run out to Wal-Mart so I don't starve. Now I'm thinking that maybe I should have just starved. For some reason, it turns out that 9 PM on a Thursday night is the peak time for food buying in Quincy and also the low tide for checkouts being open at Wal-Mart. I was in a line five people deep trying to buy my mini cereal boxes and Bottlecaps candies (okay, that was an impulse buy), and that was the short line. And let me tell you, people buy in bulk here. All the carts in front of me looked like they might collapse under the weight of their purchases. I have never seen toilet paper packages so large.
Anyway, I tried to play on my phone while I was waiting, but the wireless network at Wal-Mart required that I digitally agree to about three-pages of tiny all caps sentences, and I was afraid I might end up as a towel boy at the Walton Manor, so I had to give up. After about fifteen minutes I got up to second in line, which was when the real tragedy struck. The woman in front of me had two separate orders and paid for both by personal check. Very slowly written personal check. And the last item in her second order was fifteen Wal-Mart gift cards, each of which had to be scanned and activated separately. Which easily took ten minutes. She kept trying to make awkward jokes to me about it while it was happening but I just pretended I had Aspergers. Actually, by that point, I may not have been pretending.
I guess the good news is that the holidays have nowhere to go but up.
I'm back at my parents' house for the holiday. They never have any of the food that I eat on hand, so I had to run out to Wal-Mart so I don't starve. Now I'm thinking that maybe I should have just starved. For some reason, it turns out that 9 PM on a Thursday night is the peak time for food buying in Quincy and also the low tide for checkouts being open at Wal-Mart. I was in a line five people deep trying to buy my mini cereal boxes and Bottlecaps candies (okay, that was an impulse buy), and that was the short line. And let me tell you, people buy in bulk here. All the carts in front of me looked like they might collapse under the weight of their purchases. I have never seen toilet paper packages so large.
Anyway, I tried to play on my phone while I was waiting, but the wireless network at Wal-Mart required that I digitally agree to about three-pages of tiny all caps sentences, and I was afraid I might end up as a towel boy at the Walton Manor, so I had to give up. After about fifteen minutes I got up to second in line, which was when the real tragedy struck. The woman in front of me had two separate orders and paid for both by personal check. Very slowly written personal check. And the last item in her second order was fifteen Wal-Mart gift cards, each of which had to be scanned and activated separately. Which easily took ten minutes. She kept trying to make awkward jokes to me about it while it was happening but I just pretended I had Aspergers. Actually, by that point, I may not have been pretending.
I guess the good news is that the holidays have nowhere to go but up.
