There’s a rite aid on the road back to where my friend is staying. The water where she’s staying has the distinct scent of sulpher, as many such ground wells across the country do, and whereas it’s probably less likely to cause your body trouble than, say, chlorine or other stuff used in water treatment, it smells funky. To tie that all in I stopped at the rite aid to run in real quick like and pick up some water. Rite aid had been advertising the big Evian for like two for three bucks.
I have to dig through a liquor section, an impressive in quantity if not quality wine section, beer up both the ying and the yang, a variety of power drinks and shit to find the Evian but still, a pretty easy score. I thought the clerk was developmentally delayed for a moment because he seemed to be looking at the counter top growling as I approached.
Wait, wait, wait, I’m going to get tangled up here. The fucker was looking at the countertop growling and I was giving him the benefit of the doubt in thinking he was developmentally delayed. He almost said Hi but maybe he said ‘get behind me satan’. He run the big green barcode scanner across the bar codes, and it’s hot, I’m thirsty, my friends in the car, so I don’t bitch up about them coming up the regular price. The second I scan my card though one more Evian pops up on the screen, so my 4.50 purchase somehow becomes 9.50.
I suggest that perhaps I should only be paying for three once the receipt comes. Now, I could do some of this verbatim but you’d totally think I was making it up. Dude flips out and scans another insisting now I was getting three for the price of one. I gently pointed out, the way one gently points out anything to a child about to tantrum, that, no, if I scanned my card I would have been paying twelve dollars for three waters.
He flips out some more, takes his own wallet from his back pocket, a pocket that has likely seen a lot of crazy in it’s day, shows me the stack of green, pulls every bill out of his wallet (they were all ones, five of them, soft and well loved) insisting that must be what I want and I might as well take all the water too. The wad of green just lays there like algae caught in the net with yesterdays fish.
He suggests other ludicrous things I might want, despite my repeated insistence that all I wanted was three waters at the price of three waters, I still hadn’t mentioned the advertised sale. He threatened to call the manager, I encouraged him. As he was doing that I gestured to the horrified lady behind me clutching a small box of feminine hygiene product that she should go ahead. Dude interrupts himself on the phone to say “Lady, I’ll have to ring up them Tam-Poons over here, he broke this register.”
Oh, the lady was horrified by the scene she was in her late thirties, with every confidence in the world that she deserved tampons. The clerk, too, a grown ass man, mid forties. Almost normal looking when his eyes weren’t glowing red. I had overheard the conversation with the manager, it was something along the lines of “ I have a difficult customer here” but no description of the problem. The manager is early twenties, first thing she does is apologize, then pushes the little green wad off to the side then refunds the charges to my card to make a receipt of negative 11 something and charges three waters at the sale price so I wind up a huge wad of receipts, the last one showing 6.50 charged back to my card. Um, later I realized I never actually bought the “fifth” water that dude insisted was three waters for the price of one.
The only thing I said to her besides thank you was “Will you make sure the gentleman gets his cash back?” Neither of us would look at it. She nodded. I think the manager had done that more than once, although it wasn’t complicated, unless you’d seen it before you’d have questions, the most normal and common one being “So, what seems to be the problem here” and “Why is there a wad of ones on the counter?” Um, and just so I don’t make the manager seem like too much of a saint, at some point she really should have apologized to the customer or asked him if the fix was ok or to his, mine, satisfaction. I mean it was, for sheer entertainment value it exceeded my basic need for satisfaction and went towards my lifelong thesis that life is not a cabaret it’s a fucking circus.
I didn’t complain about dude to her at all. The Tam-Poon lady looked like she really needed to debrief with someone, but I left. It’s possible she had words. Or maybe she was part of the sting. You think I’m being funny, I checked my wallet and pockets before leaving because that would have justified the wacky theatrics; distract and grab. Um, the only thing of value in my pockets is attached to me and I’m not sure it has an objective value to very many other people. Well, as a trophy. That clerk might have human bits mounted on plaques on his wall. Maybe not, not only did I honestly check my pockets before leaving, I honestly sized him up at the height of his crazy and figured I could take him if need be. Most water transactions don’t need sizing up of potential opponents. Well, at least 75 % of water transactions I’ve been privy to or a party therein. Ok, 70 %, at least 70% of my water transactions don’t involve the sizing up of the water bearer.
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