Safari, So Good

I'm not a big fan of grocery store self-checkouts for no actual reason, I'm just not. I'm nagged by the suspicion because someone else has always rung up my groceries, I suppose, that someone else should always do it and I'm not particular about who that is as long as it's not me. 

At self-checkouts I take the stuff out of the cart (I'm a wimp and will fill a basket with so much stuff I hyperextend my elbow trying to carry it while pretending it doesn't weigh a ton so I grab a cart even if I'm only getting two things which became ten things because they always do) run it over the scanner (not too fast but not too slow either, sort of a Goldilocks of the laser beam), wait for the beep or boop depending on the store, put the bought stuff in the recyclable bags I always bring, dig through my wallet for the coupons, scan those, then pay for my stuff and leave. 

I will concede I'm not throwing the delivery truck when it arrives in the back of the store filled with stuff and putting all of it on the shelves, but I'm doing everything else so I think I should be considered part of the store staff, at least as far as using the break room and maybe for the annual beach outing. 

That's never going to happen and I 've accepted it even if I'm not happy about it as I queue up with the cashier in the twelve items or less line behind someone with eighty-five items who glares at all of us behind him daring any of us to say one word and Pow! to the Moon, Alice! (or Mars if you're Presiden Trump who seems to think they're the same thing.)

Not me. Oh, I'll stew about it, sure, but I decided for my sixty-seventh birthday what I wanted was to celebrate my sixty-eighth, so I let that kind of provocation roll off my back and I wait my turn. Invariably the cashier greets me and asks, 'did you find everything okay? undeterred by my now-standard answer of "yes, you'll have to hide it better next time." 

She doesn't blink or give the slightest indication she even heard me, damn you, E..F. Hutton. I don't even get a thin smile; it's like playing to an oil painting. On second thought, maybe that self-checkout is worth another look.
-bill kenny