Shall I bite my tongue 'till blood soaks my shirt?

I stood at the register, contemplating the greater meaning of life. A guy approached my conveyor belt and began to throw things on it, a ploy to attract as much attention as possible. I’m snapped out of my inner world and begin the scanning and bagging.

As he is throwing the items on the belt, he begins a rant.

“Since minimum wage increased, the price of everything has too!” I know very little about the status of minimum-wage induced inflation, so I nod and continue to scan. Bonnie, another cashier seems to know more.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your prices have gone up.” I wonder why people always infer the possession of a store to the possession of its employees.

“They have not.”

The guy picks up my Mountain Dew from the register, shaking it at Bonie.

“How much did this used to cost?”

“It has been $1.17 with tax ever since I started working here.”

He slams my soda back down. I look at Bonnie. She seems enraged. I share her sentiment, as a stranger has just shaken the carbonation out of my $1.17 soda. I briefly wonder if his rant would end or get worse if I asked him to by me another soda. As another cashier states the higher price of Pepsi products at Minit Mart, I contemplate ringing up his soda a second time, confident eh should replace mine.

It’s then that I see him removing things from bags. I pretend not to notice. This gets much more difficult as he begins dumping bags out by their bottoms onto the space next to the bag carousel.

“I like my produce with my produce and my boxed goods with my boxed goods. But that’s just how I do it.”

Evidently, I had committed the cardinal sin of allowing a head of lettuce and a box of saltines to co-exist in the same bag. My grip tightens on my tongue as I try not to reassure him that it’s good he does it that way since he is the one now bagging the groceries. The customers in line are all shooting my sympathetic glances, of which my expert bagger seems unaware.

The situation culminates, and the blood begins to pour from my tongue, when he tosses a food stamp card onto the counter. The endless stream of ironies concerning his rants in relationship to his welfare status are threatening to burst through my clenched jaw. Then the card does not work, and I get to spend an extra fifteen minutes with him, trying to diagnose the problem.

Finally he leaves. My office manager, James, comes in later, handing me empty bags.

“Your buddy left these for you in his cart, I guess he can’t bag them right either.”