The People of Winco

So nothing terribly interesting to report today. Dental appointment, filling, errands, bleh. I made the mistake of not trusting my instincts at Winco. Since it's bag-it-yourself, I usually look for a line where it looks like the people in front of me don't have too much, which means by the time it comes for me to bag my stuff they have left and moved on, freeing me up to bag my stuff and get out of there before the next person's purchases start bumping up behind mine.

There were only two people in line ahead of me. I had spotted them earlier in the store and assumed they were a couple. The man obviously had at least a physical disability going on, and quite likely a mental one. The woman appeared to be just a touch brighter in the bulb department. My instincts told me that, although it appeared they had maybe 10-15 items, this was going to be one of those things where I was probably going to be standing around for a while, but I figured, "Hey, there are two of them. Combined they make one whole functioning person, so..." WRONG.

First off, the guy went first and appeared to be paying for his part of the groceries, whatever part that was. I couldn't even see how many items (just one lonely cucumber, rolling around bagless in the cart), so there couldn't have been many. I, on the other hand, had a cartload (catching up on several weeks of doing no grocery shopping). I watched as he slowly paid in cash, in ones (?), and went over to his seemingly minuscule purchase and proceeded to bag it, while the woman paid for her 15 items, bagged them and left as the checker was ringing up my 150 items. Unfortunately, the checker also made the mistake of thinking that the man was going to be done with his bagging before the woman that made her purchase after him. WRONG. I watched as my items, one by one, chugged down the conveyor belt on his side of the bagging area as the man would put an item in his bag, screw up his face, tongue clenched between his teeth, shake his head, and decide that just wasn't the place for the cucumber, taking it out, taking a few more items out, and then proceeding to bag again with the methodicalness of one attempting to disarm a nuclear weapon. I would watch this, standing their helplessly, as I periodically looked longingly at the bagging area of the woman, abandoned long ago, its conveyor belt sitting empty in front of me, taunting me. He was JUST leaving as I paid for my items.

In hindsight, I suppose I could have offered to help him with his 5 items, but somehow I think that might have ended up with me being bludgeoned to death by a cucumber.