It was an ordinary day, like any other. I was standing behind
the cash register waiting for work to come at me, both hands crammed into my
pockets, watching a woman at the customer service desk explaining her dilemma
to my co-worker, Mary, who wore a look of genuine concern. The woman, who
seemingly forgot to use a hand-held mirror to look at the back of her uncombed
hair, was frantically waving her hands in the air. I cocked my head to the side
and took a few steps closer to hear. Ahhhhh… she bought a hair dryer that never
did work and now look! Her hair is just a mess. I suppressed a giggle and
watched as Mary took the appliance out of the bag. The end of it was black and
there was a crack running along the side of what was once a pretty blue tool.
No box or packaging. No receipt. Mary wanted to know where and when she'd
bought the item and how it became blackened at the end and cracked. She
couldn't remember when, but it was here at this store. She'd bought it just the
way it is.
Mary smiled at the woman and said, “You bought a broken, burnt hair dryer and
now you want us to give you a refund for a piece of junk? Are you kidding me?”
Well that set her off. She began shouting about our store having such a bad
reputation for treating its customers with disrespect and acting like they are
liars. She demanded her money back! Mary asked her how much she paid for it.
She was pretty sure it was $29.99. Mary told her she wasn’t going to give her
any money and she should take her hair dryer to a repairman. The woman stomped
her foot and clenched her teeth as her face morphed into a pair of bright red
cheeks. She promised to call the top guy and tell him what she thought of his
store and the people that work there. She grabbed the hair dryer out of Mary’s
hand so hard that it slipped and fell to the floor with a bang where the blue,
plastic appliance cracked in two and skittered along until it reached its final
resting place against the wall. Motionless and silent, everyone stared at the
pile of rubble. Then the woman began to laugh. She looked my way, pointed a
finger at me, threw her head back and laughed louder. With each turn of her
head she saw a new pair of eyes looking at her in disbelief. Mary never moved;
never uttered a word. Hers was the last face the woman took in before turning
and walking out the door, shaking her head and laughing over the demolished
hair dryer.
I watched as Mary gathered the things needed to clean up the black and blue
fragments when I caught something out of the corner of my eye. An overflowing
cart was headed right at me. I couldn’t see who or what was propelling it
forward. A tiny woman peeked out from around the gigantic mound, her smile
slowing revealing large teeth that all but consumed her entire face.
“You ready for this?” she quipped.
“I am if you are”.
“OK then,” she answered in a firm, but awkwardly squeaky voice, “but I don’t
want you to start until I’m ready”.
That figures. Another one of those. They want to make sure I am doing
everything the way they think it should be done. If they had their way, they’d
jump behind the register and do it themselves. But deep down they know they could
never do the superb job that I perform on a daily basis. These people are
control freaks. We all know at least one. Given half a chance, they’d pin a
medal on their shirt or wear some distinctive hat so everyone would know,
without a doubt, that they are the Big Cheese. I shoved my hands back into my
pockets and waited for the go-ahead. She tried unsuccessfully to make her
way around the heap of stuff on wheels. When that didn’t work she backed all
the way up and walked around the monster. With her feet firmly planted on the
ground she tugged, putting her weight into it and pulled it up to the conveyor
belt.
“Ok, now,” she quipped, hands out in front, fingers splayed. I waited for the
inevitable instructions that she was surely getting ready to describe to me
using hand signs in the air. “I’m going to try to get these heavy things up
first so I can load them back into the cart first.” Uh huh, sure. I couldn’t
wait to watch her dig into the bottom and bring up that 25 pound case of
plastic water bottles.
“How about this,” I smiled. “Just start putting your things up here on the belt
and I’ll come ‘round there and scan those heavy things with my hand scanner.
That way we’ll both save our backs the ache.”
The look on her face was one of complete confusion. I showed her the little
hand held scanner every store except your corner all-nighter has for just this
purpose. Still the look. Clearly she did not want any part of the hand scanning
ability I so desperately wanted to perform. I could hardly believe what I saw
next, but there it was; the HAND. The ‘say no more, do no more’
hand signal we’re all familiar with when someone just wants everything to stop.
Big Cheese. I stood there, hands at my side, defeated. She began rummaging
through her avalanche of merchandise while looking back at me every so often,
suspicion clouding her gray, beady eyes. As she put her items on the belt she
made sure to keep them at the far end so they wouldn’t be accidentally scanned
before she was ready. She was losing the battle, her frustration growing while
I continued to watch. I could have reached over and flipped the switch that
stopped the moving belt. But I had a score to settle.
She harrumphed and growled, “Can you please turn this thing off!!!”
I leaned a little closer to her, “I’m sorry, what’s that?”
“Turn it off! TURN IT OFF!”
“Oh sure….,” I answered as sweetly as I could with a smile. A little flick with
my finger and the belt floundered to a halt.
Gingerly, she cradled the bread and laid it at the very end of the belt, then
turned to watch as several things fell to the floor with a crash. Cereal boxes,
packages of pasta and hamburger helper lay bruised but unbroken across the
tile. Never giving me a single glance, she scooped them up and threw them on
the belt. I watched in horror as she started moving things from the front of
the basket to the back, each item teetering as a new one was added. She dove
head first into the basket determined to get that gigantic case of water out
from under the remaining items. The frozen foods showed no cooperation; Tony’s
pizzas, Birdseye veggies and Lean Cuisine slipping and sliding, gaining speed
as they neared the edge of their confines. The woman frantically swiped at
these frozen delights as more of them careened right out of their invisible
boundaries and leapt to the floor. An apple shot strait out from that basket,
flying through the air at just the right angle to catch the eye of those double
doors opening them before it rolled to a gentle stop. Grapes loosened
themselves from their plastic bag and plopped to the floor. Boxes of tea,
containers of coffee, jars of pickles, salsa, olives, mayonnaise, mustard and
ketchup joined the fray in the mad march to suicide.
And there I stood, waiting, both hands crammed into my pockets, for the
go-ahead. Well I figured I should probably help the poor woman. So I punched
the intercom button and made the announcement “clean up on aisle 3”.
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