Capital Strain

So I get off work around 5:15 today. I head over to Rainbow to do some grocery shopping. It's a zoo, the after work brigade has met again to do some frenzied consuming.

I'm slightly irritated, I'm hungry, I'm stuck in shopping cart traffic jams here and there. People move in and out as if they don't see you or care that other people are around.

I finish hunting and gathering, I search for a fast moving, short line. I see Aisle 11. A guy's just finishing up unloading his cart. I pick this one, just as an older feller with three items in his hands comes up behind me. I consider letting him go in front, but finders keepers. This game applies at busy times, I surmise.

I start unloading my cart, quickly yet carefully. After about a minute I hear the older guy say something like "Sixteen." I look up quickly, not knowing whether or not he spoke to me. He is staring right at me.

I ask "What?"

He says "Sixteen" with a little smile on his face.

I wonder what he's talking about. My age? I put two more items on the conveyer belt. As I do so he says "Seventeen, eighteen."

I look back and the smile is still there. I smile back. He looks like he could be autistic, he's just counting my groceries. I figure that maybe he'll count the rest in succession, on the last one stating the concluded number in a fit of jubilation.

He then lets out an exasperated sigh on number 20, and I look up again. That smile, I realize, is more a look of irritation than mongoloid serenity. A light bulb goes off in my head. I turn and look at the aisle sign and, as I had thought, I am in is the 15 items or less express lane.

I say "Oh Jeeze, I'm sorry, I didn't even realize that I was in the express lane."

He says "Well, you're here now."

I keep putting food on the belt, saying "Ah, it's not much more." I had about twenty items total. I'm pretty thorough in my bagging, and I'm pretty quick in paying for everything. Immediately after getting my receipt, the man steps up and says to the check out guy "Paper please!" in an almost English town crier fashion, rushed, official, and above all, irritated.

I kind of snicker at my internal thought process, he gets everything taken care of in about the time it takes me to bag five items, and then he swings past me, giving me the biggest stink eye I think I've received in the last three years.

His life seems hard. Or I tend to bring out the darker, irate sides out of people.

Autolux -- "Turnstile Blues"