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Reality Bites by James Norton for the week of August 16
Ignorance is bliss – so is Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey
How many times, over and over, do I have to complain about ignorant people you ask? Oh, let me count the ways little one. No, I’m not going to take a stab at some unnamed city worker/department head or the people that work at Dunkin’ Donuts this time – I’ve danced that dance and it doesn’t do anything for me anymore.
I find it utterly disturbing that there are fewer and fewer options for essential items today locally without having to deal with some sort of knucklehead. Yeah, sure, I stopped going to Dunkin’ Donuts over a year ago (I don’t mean the ones I was banned from either, so stop snickering) and I don’t shop for food in the local market regularly – so that helped in the beginning.
I have been favoring a particular brand of gas station for quite a while now – I won’t mention it by name – for reasons I just don’t need to get into here. The other day I’m sitting in my car filling it up again, and I start to smell gas big time. I usually never have a problem when someone filling my tank pulls the little lever or whatever it is and walks away while the gas flows into the tank, but it seemed like a long time for him to be gone. Then I smell the gas – not the normal “you’re at a gas station, stupid” gas smell – I’m talking the not so normal “you’ve been drenched in gas, stupid” gas smell. Not being shy, I yelled for the guy to come back to the pump and he did. Then it was like “The Bad News Bears Pump Gas.” I think I just dated myself with that.
So there I sit, gas spewing out all over the place – my car, the ground, running out onto the street across the sidewalk – it wasn’t a pretty sight. Then out of nowhere, a gaggle of knuckleheads comes running – and here is where it gets a little sketchy. I spend the next four or five minutes trying to figure out if they’re doing their best to ensure my safety and clean up the mess, or cover up any trace of it happening in the first place.
I’m thinking a bit of both, but more on the last part.
What sealed the deal for me to never go back there was the guy telling me it was $65.00 for the gas. Now I just happen to be very good with math and a bit of an information nerd. I know my gas tank capacity in my Lincoln is 14.7 gallons and the price of the gas was $3.19 per gallon. That’s just a hair under $47.00 if my math is right (and it usually is). Now the fun begins – I tell the guy I’m not paying for the gas spilled all over the place, and he says he is going to call the cops.
Well, he got more than he bargained for this morning. I told him that as luck would have it, I had just seen a friend of mine that was on duty and heck; I could get him to stop by right now if he liked. $40.00 was the next word out of his mouth; I paid him, and went on my way. Seems like I did the wrong thing? No, not really – they were covering the spill up so well that there would be very little to investigate by the time anyone got there.
My misery with coffee is next – no, not the addiction to caffeine – just being able to get some with as little interaction with stupid people as possible.
Now before with Dunkin’ Donuts, I realize it was a combination of people not speaking the language and being stupid, so now my latest folly with a couple of different Starbucks makes me wonder if there isn’t a general sense of “dumb” instilled in that industry. Coffee keeps me on my toes – keeps me in the game – I need it to function properly. There’s no way around it for me – and countless others. Nevermind that I just can’t go back to several Starbucks because of completely stupidity by a few of the “baristas” (and NO I haven’t been banned from any of them, yet, thank you) – I had the same kind of moronic interaction with one the other morning that I had become accustomed to at Dunkin’s.
I had to say “Venti Espresso Frappuccino” eight times and she still couldn’t wrap her mind around it – she still told the barista “Venti Caramel Macchiato.” Yeah I understand you might not know what the hell I’m even talking about or what the difference is – aside from the obvious differences in wording Рbut one is cold and the other is hot – it’s pretty hard not to grasp THAT when you WORK THERE.
Now we get to the food/grocery portion of my escapades.
Yeah, I will still pop over to Stop and Shop for basics and meat/poultry stuffs, but for everything else including fruits, veggies and whatnot, my wife and I go over to Whole Foods in Cambridge. I just felt you cringe, relax.
It’s been okay for a long time now – and even though sometimes the items are way more expensive – you get what you pay for, and we happen to like organic food these days. So I usually keep my head down so I don’t notice the freak show going on around me when I’m walking through the store – it’s a system that works well – until the inevitable happened the other day.
I’m standing waiting for something at the prepared food counter and this woman and her kid almost knock me over trying to get to the free samples of some sort of silly chicken concoction. Now this woman couldn’t have been a day younger than 50 and maybe 5 feet flatfooted, weighing no more than 130 lbs – and she almost knocked me over. I’m 5 foot 11 inches tall and on a light day, 265 pounds. I look at her like she had two heads and then turn my attention back to the guy getting my food, and she does it again – only this time I literally had to grab the counter to keep from falling over and probably killing myself on the concrete floor.
Oh how I wanted to spin around, kick her basket across the store and ask if I could body slam into her a couple of times, but instead I just pushed myself back in her direction and whoops, my arm hit her in the side of the head. No, I wasn’t trying to hit a woman, so get a life, just trying to put myself back into an upright position. I can’t help it if my arm connected to the side of her head ever so gently, can I? She knew she was at fault, and believe it or not, grabbed ANOTHER free food sample for her and her devil spawn and scampered away.
At this point, I’m thinking maybe I should buy a really expensive espresso/cappuccino maker, an electric car and see if HomeRuns is still in business. God help me.
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