Adventures at Crappy Mart

Mrs. Smoot has sent me on another mission to the grocery store knowing full well that in 17 years of marriage, I have never once returned home with the correct product she asked me to buy. In reality, it would probably be much more efficient and quicker for her to order whatever she needs directly from a Chinese manufacturer and wait for it to be sent here via barge instead of sending me to the store.

I headed down to our local Crappy But Convenient Mart to make a simple purchase of some sort of banana filling, which involved circumnavigating the store umpteen times before I got to the right section, and another 15 minutes of staring at boxes of varying sizes and flavors. I never did find one that just plainly said “banana,” so as per usual I just picked the closest thing I could find, which was undoubtedly the wrong thing.

The checkout line was just about as much fun as eyeball surgery. I chose the “10 items or less” line, which meant that I was just going to stand there and be annoyed with people who figure that “17” is pretty close to 10 in the sense of being a number and everything.

It was almost my turn in line when we hit the usual snag with the woman in front of me. Her broccoli rang up on the screen as “cauliflower.” You’d think that the cashier could simply push the delete button and ring it up correctly, but no, that would make too much sense and would take too little time. Instead she has to get a Mystery Person to authorize this tricky maneuver. And judging by the amount of time it took to accomplish, the Mystery Person apparently needs to have a rank no lower than Pope.

After much fanfare, they punched a series of secret codes into the register, and the cashier prepared to ring it up again. And of course it rang up again as “cauliflower.” I decided I wasn’t about to wait for them to go through the process of contacting the Vatican again, so I stomped over to the next line, which of course was much longer.

On the bright side, we now have our banana filling, which was very close to being the right thing I was supposed to buy!