Things that make you go AAARRRGGGHHH!!!

I was running errands earlier this afternoon, and had stopped to pick up a few things (five, to be exact) at the local Costco warehouse store. As is usual for a Saturday, the store was pretty crowded, and I ended up in the checkout line behind a woman with a cartload of stuff the size of Mount Ranier. The cashier eventually finished ringing up this lady's very large order and announced the total...at which time the customer suddenly awoke from her daydreaming and realized, "Oh, my goodness...I guess I have to pay for this!" She rooted around in her enormous purse, eventually locating a wallet which turned out to contain no money. She rummaged in the purse some more and eventually managed to find three different money envelopes, from which she extracted about half of the amount needed to pay her bill. She then asked the cashier if she could apply the cash to the bill, and pay the rest with a debit card. The cashier agreed, counted up the cash, and announced the remaining total... whereupon the lady now realized she needed a debit card! She went back to excavating in her purse and in time extracted a battered debit card, which she swiped and poked a PIN which turned out to be wrong. She tried the PIN twice more with the same result, then went searching for yet another debit card. This one, too, seemed not to like any of the PINs she entered. Finally, she produced a third debit card, this one wrapped in the letter from the bank which had provided her PIN ... she carefully, digit by digit, copied the PIN from the letter, and successfully finished paying for her purchases.

But the story isn't over, because she thought the amount was too high. She remained parked at the end of the checkout lane while she laboriously compared the receipt (which was of prodigious length) to the contents of her cart.

Now, I don't know about you, but this sort of thing annoys me. I dislike having my time wasted by someone who's being stupid. If you're in a checkout line, common sense should indicate that you will eventually be asked for some form of payment, and common courtesy would tell you to have it ready so you can speed things along and not inconvenience those in line behind you. I don't think this lady will ever read this blog...and if, by some miracle, she read it, I doubt she'd recognize herself. Whatever happened to good manners and common sense?

Okay, I'm done fulminating now...time to finish doing the laundry so that I can enjoy other things on this partly-cloudy, chilly afternoon.

Enjoy your weekend. Avoid idiots in checkout lines. See you tomorrow.

Bilbo