Fun With Grocery Checkers...

I'm a huge fan of the comic strip "Pearls Before Swine". I think the cartoonist Stephan Pastis and I were cut from the same bizarre mold. Which is scary, because to think there are two of us running around out there with such a skewed view of the world, well I just don't know. Anyway, he also has a blog, and in one of his posts, he writes about how he had some fun one day in the grocery store. You know those plastic bar divider thingies you use to segregate your groceries from the shopper's stuff in front of yours? Well, instead of laying the divider thingie across the belt, he laid it lengthwise on the belt, and put his groceries above and below it. Pretty funny stuff. So when I was at Safeway tonight, I decided to try the same thing. Bingo...comic gold.

The lady in front of me was almost done being rung up, so I found a divider thingie and placed it lengthwise in the middle of the belt. I set my items along either side of the divider as Stephan had done. As the checker turned her attention from the lady who was departing to my items, she looked at the belt, literally did a double take, then looked at me.

"Are those your groceries?" she asked me.

"Yep" I replied.

"Why did you do that?", nodding her head toward the divider thingie.

"Do what?" I asked innocently.

"Put your groceries like that?"

"Did I do something wrong"? I asked.

She paused for a moment, and I thought I could hear her brain shifting gears without putting in the clutch.

"You're supposed to use that to separate your stuff from the other person's stuff" she huffed.

"But, there aren't any other items here on the belt...they're all mine" I replied.

There are very few times when I have ever seen someone completely speechless, but I had achieved that feat with my checker. She stood there, mouth partially open staring at me, and could say nothing else but "But, that's not how you do it!"

"Well", I replied, "Can you show me where it says I *have* to do it like that, or some rulebook or store policy defining how these plastic divider-thingies are to be used?"

Another open mouthed stare...

Before my little bit of fun at someone else's expense triggered a stroke or a seizure, I decided to let her off the hook and explain why I was doing what I was doing. She eventually got a pretty good laugh out of it, and as I left her checkout counter, she said she was going to check out this funny comic strip I mentioned.

I wonder if the checkers at Raley's read "Pears Before Swine"?....