This close

On Fathers Day I stopped at the grocery store to procure several items before heading over to my Grandparent’s house. It was to be a quick in and out job, the kind of shopping trip that if reviewed on store video tape would only reveal you as a black and white blur. Sure, you could swipe a ham but you wouldn’t only because it wouldn’t be sporting of you.

After approximately 2 minutes I had found the items I needed—cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, Diet Coke—and headed for the checkout. There were only two shoppers in the 15 items or less line so I fell in behind them. Of course this would be a mistake. First of all the Asian couple in front of me had in the neighborhood of 25 items which in itself is a serious violation of the 15 items or less line ethics but their twelve bags of King crab legs wouldn’t be the problem. The problem would manifest itself in the form of the two morbidly obese people in the front of the line.

They stood with their arms on their waists (which was quite a feat in itself) and were mumbling things which I couldn’t make out. The cashier, a young woman with bleached blond hair, looked nervously about, not making eye contact with the two large customers.

In time I gathered from the bits of conversation that passed between the cashier and the two waiting customers that they were all waiting on a price check. The item? A pastry the size of the Love Boat. I could have taken a four week cruise on that pastry with all of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends and never once touched water. It was the biggest confection of any sort I’d ever laid eyes on and it so it was no wonder that the couple was as big as they were.

After about five minutes (yes I was growing quite impatient) a cashier came back holding another equally large pastry but it turned out that he pastry wasn’t he same pastry as the fat couples so he once again disappeared into the aisles of the store.

“This is ridiculous,” the woman behind me said. I nodded. This was getting ridiculous. I had exactly four items and already I’d been in the fifteen items or less line for nearly ten minutes. I started reading the covers of the tabloids and when that got boring I started to count the number of items the fat couple had and I wasn’t surprised to find they had 23 items.

After counting how many different types of candy were in the aisle and memorizing the order in which they sat on the shelves the other cashier finally came back. “Those pastries are $2.99,” he said.

“Did you say $2.99?” the fat woman said.

“I’m not paying $2.99 for that pastry,” the fat man said.

“You have got to be fucking shitting me,” I said under my breath.

Obviously this couple had indulged in more than one $2.99 pastry and for the size of the thing $2.99 was not only a reasonable price it was a STEAL! That pastry could have fed an entire village in the rainforest for three months.

The couple then started to get surly with the blond cashier, chastising her because the pastry didn’t have a price on it. I wanted to suggest that maybe they ate it but bit my tongue.

So, after fifteen minutes we were finally ready to check out. WRONG! The fat woman pulled out a wad of coupons and shuffled them like a deck of cards. EVERYTHING she bought had a coupon and while she threw coupons at the cashier she chastised her for not being fast enough.

I was this close {read space in-between these brackets} to telling the rude mother fuckers to shove the pastry and their coupons up their corpulent asses but I didn’t because jail didn’t seem like an attractive option at the time.