I GET BY…WITH A LITTLE HELP [M, 11-25-24]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Shopping Adventures of An Old Man—I GET BY…WITH A LITTLE HELP [M, 11-25-24]

 

She was in line behind me at Target, to use the self-checkout contraption. Around seventeen, With her was a young man who looked like her boyfriend, and a woman who looked like her mother.

I don’t normally use the self-checkout thingamajig. I don’t normally go to Target at suppertime on Sunday. Or any other time. But this was an emergency. Helen’s mouse had died. No, she didn’t cut off its tail with a carving knife. But she was trying to finish a grocery order pickup for Monday, and that’s just hard to do without a mouse.

I went to the back door of Target, because it was faster to drive to that end of the store, and easier to park. I forgot that there are no cash registers there, with real people who work at them. The back-end checkout has only the self-confusion stations. [1]

But I didn’t think of that right away. I was on a mission. I found the mouses. I picked out the prettiest one. Cream colored. Flower pix. It cost more, but it’s nice for a woman to have a little beauty always in hand.

Since I was there anyway, and the microwave splash-dome department was close, I got one of those plastic covers to put over food in the radar range. The old one lost its top in a stove burner incident.

Then to checkout. Three of those things to choose from. I took the one that was closest to the fiftyish lady who was supposed to be helping folks but was sitting behind some carts looking at her phone. For some reason she seemed to be uninterested in fulfilling the duties of a minimum wage job on Sunday night. Still, I thought proximity would be good if I got into trouble.

Yes, the proximity was good, but only for the girl in line behind me. After watching me for a polite amount of trouble, she left her mother and boyfriend and stepped up, and with a sweet smile that showed her braces, asked if she could help me.

I explained that when I put the splash cover on the scanning surface, it had charged me for three, and I didn’t know how to get two of the charges off, or how to start over. She tried. She pushed numerous places on the mechanism. Finally, she went over to the “working” lady and asked her politely to come help us. Reluctantly, she came over, pushed some more places, and we were ready to start over. By “we,” I mean the girl with the braces.

She scanned the cover. Then, as she scanned the mouse, she marveled at its beauty. I explained that it was for my wife, who deserved a beautiful mouse for living with me for 65 years. She said, “That’s so sweet.”

As part of my program to require all credit card slots to point the same way, I acted like I was trying to get my card into the reader by pushing it straight in. I knew, maybe, that it had to be pushed up from the bottom. My benefactress did not understand my plan. She smiled and said, “Would you like me to try?” She took the card and inserted it correctly. [The back end of Target doesn’t have the scanners where you just touch your card.]

By that time, one of the other scanners had come free and her mother and boyfriend had checked out their stuff and were waiting for her. As they walked away, I heard the mother say, in a voice much like her daughter’s, “That was so sweet.”

Well, yes, but I wasn’t letting her help me just to get a compliment.

John Robert McFarland

1] I also forgot that it was supper time, and even though the sun was shining as I drove to Target, it gets dark an hour earlier now, and I don’t drive in the dark, usually, but that’s a different story.