You can judge me later if you like, but tonight my little section of conveyor belt in the supermarket was replete with three tell-tale items:
- one large vegetarian pizza
- a 1.25L bottle of Zero Sugar Coca Cola
- one copy of Solo: a Star Wars Story on DVD
The lady in the queue behind me reached past and grabbed the shopping divider (I still have no idea what the correct name for those things is) and excused herself as she thumped it between her shopping and mine. I apologised for not handing it to her, by explaining that I was a million miles away, which I was. She said that was okay... which I’m not sure it was.
I had been daydreaming about something or other, tired and somewhat socially unaware.
I’d been to a thing where I’d been immediately seconded into a quiz team, who had given me a sheet of paper with a picture round to work on. It took me a few minutes to realise it (I think I still had my coat on actually) but it suddenly occurred to me that this picture round.., was one of mine! I’d compiled it some months ago and nobody there knew!
I had to quickly work out what the right thing to do was. Little dilemmas like that are really difficult! Sometimes I handle those things well, sometimes I’m not so great.
And there I was in the supermarket, about to be ‘not so great’ to the man on the checkout; I just didn’t know it yet. Why is it always the little things that trip us up?
Anyway. The slow-boiling customer behind me wanted to divide her own shopping into two, presumably to pay with two different methods, and so before I realised it, she was reaching past me again, for the next divider. I smiled, knowing what was coming next. Sure enough, before I had a chance to intervene, she was off for a third time, to separate her own shopping from the customer’s behind her. I thought I’d make light of that by gently chuckling. Yeah. Not that funny was it?
She looked at my shopping and raised an eyebrow. It was suddenly my turn to have my three items checked and beeped by the man on the checkout.
“Alright?” he asked cheerily.
“Hello,” I said. He beeped the coke through and it tumbled to the end.
“How’s it going?”
“Yeah not bad.” Pizza was next. I was already looking for my nectar card in my wallet. He scanned the DVD.
“Oh cool! I really rated it!” he said, talking about the film.
“Oh excellent!” I replied, in anticipation.
“Yeah. Have you seen it?”
And then for some reason I don’t understand, the funny bit of my brain rifled through the filing cabinet of possible responses, flicked past all the options marked as ‘boring-small-talk’ ... and settled for:
“Well, erm, obviously not!”
Sarcasm. I’d gone for sarcasm. What was I thinking? He looked crestfallen, hurt even! And I immediately felt dreadful. I don’t blame him for trying to be friendly! Obviously it’s not unexpectable to like a film at the movies, or at someone’s house, and then months later, buy it from your local shop to watch it again. Way to go, brain. And then it was too late.
“You got a nectar card?” (gruff)
“Er yeah, sure.” (feeble)
“That’s your evening then is it?” he said, nodding at the three forlorn-looking items I was taking home to eat, guzzle and watch, clearly alone, clearly like some sort of asocial Star Wars loving nerd-hermit.
“Yeah,” I said, smiling weakly. The lady behind coughed impatiently.
“Have a good night then!” said the checkout guy, quickly thrusting pound coins and a receipt into my free hand.
“Yeah, um, you too!” I said as cheerily as I could muster. I hate that I had been sarcastic.
I did the quiz by the way, in case you were wondering how I solved that little dilemma. I figured it was okay to know stuff, regardless of how you know it, even if it just so happened that you only know it because you thought up the questions in the first place, as long as you did it from memory. I confessed to the team though.
And I went home, ate a whole vegetarian pizza and drank a whole bottle of Zero Sugar Coca Cola while watching Solo: a Star Wars Story. And I enjoyed it. And I think that too, might just about be fair enough.
The tired, antisocial daydreaming sarcastic reflex response though - I’m going to have to work on that.
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