I had a dream that I was working at Stop & Shop
(if you don’t dream big, what’s the use in dreaming, right?) and this lady went shopping with her two kids and had a cart full of all kinds of vegetables.
She left it unattended in front of the main entrance. Anybody walking through the doors would see the little storing area off to the side where all stores put their empty carts for shoppers to take…and then a cart with paper bags full of many different kinds of squash.
I grumbled and grabbed the cart, ready to report it to the service desk and then store the vegetables in our cooler. When it comes to anything abandoned that was bought in the produce section, we have to put it away immediately because those are perishable goods and if the customer comes back for them and they’re all rotten, they’ll yell at us even when it’s their fault they left it there. It also pisses us off because then we lose money.
Anyway, I went to move the bags out of the cart because she had overstuffed this one and it was impossible to move. I divided the vegetables amongst two carriages now and was prepared to grab one to go to the back room to put all the stuff away until the woman and her two children stopped me.
“Excuse me! Don’t you ever steal someone else’s cart! That is mine! What poor customer service!”
I stared at her for half a second and had a whole inventory of things I wanted to say to her, but I bit my tongue.
“I’m so sorry. Here, let me put these back,” I said, grabbing the bags from my cart to return them to her original one.
“You better,” she said.
Suddenly, a man in a giant Barney suit
approached us and started entertaining the children.
He did this by telling their mother “You should be fuckin’ happy! Everybody should be fuckin’ happy! Right, kids?”
In the process of moving one of the bags of vegetables, I’d found that whoever bagged these groceries put a salad from the salad bar on top of them — like an idiot. Those cases are so flimsy and break so easily — and lo and behold, the salad container fell over and tipped out.
The lady turned to me and scolded me, telling me I was an idiot, a dumb high school kid, I was terrible at my job, I didn’t care about the customer (the sad part of this is, this isn’t far from something that would happen. Minus the Barney suit) and then she told me “I hope you don’t plan to go to UMass Amherst, that’s where this state sends all our idiots and clearly you’ve got a lot to learn.”
I opened my mouth like I wanted to say something, then turned to walk away to go get a manager because I just couldn’t deal with this woman. I was too angry to even try.
I turned to walk back into the store then decided against it.
I turned back towards her, tears in my eyes, and said “You know what? UMass Amherst is not a bad school and I’m not just some dumb high school kid, I’m just a DuUUUUUuUUUuMb college kid who goes there and I’ve taken some wonderful classes there and gotten quite a bit of valuable insight. It’s changed the way I look at things and made me realize that nothing is ever worth being degraded like this so I don’t give a fuck if you tell my manager I’m rude or an idiot, this is not worth it and you’re a bitch.”
I walked away from her to get a manager — because I guess after bitching out a customer, it’s a great time to get an authority figure so the customer can tell them how terrible you actually are with proof to back it up — and as I walked out, I angrily kicked down a sign post that said what the daily sales were.
By the time I got to my manager, multiple customers had already reported they had overheard a hostile argument in the main entrance between an employee and a shopper, so my manager ran over to me and asked what was going on.
I told him this lady was a bitch and had called me an idiot by degrading my college education and I didn’t appreciate it.
I followed him back out to the entrance and the lady was now claiming the sign post I’d kicked had been used by me to whack her over the head.
She said, straight to his face, while I was standing right there, that I had picked this up and used it to strike her across the face.
In front of her children.
And Barney.
I grumbled “Liar” under my breath and walked away, telling my manager I’d quit and was getting the hell out of there.
As I was getting my stuff out of my locker, a customer who was a reporter for the town newspaper stopped me to get a quote on the situation and I told her that I was proud of where I went to school and didn’t pay $30,000 to be told I was a moron by just anybody.
A week later, a local news station interviewed my closest friends (but could only seem to figure out that was Rachel, seems accurate) in order to get an idea of my character.
It was probably Fox trying to portray that “oh she had a 3.0 GPA and participated in Chorus in high school” white kid thing in order to make you feel bad for me, like my race and stupid academic accomplishments was supposed to make anybody think I was scot-free.
But it was all okay because Rachel gave the statement “Yeah, we’ve been best friends for the last three years and we would always have conversations about Satan and how cool he was” so nobody actually felt bad for me at all and believed I’d violently struck a customer with a metal sign post.
It was a good time and quite oddly realistic.
