Or is it just me? Today I had the chance to go shopping at Sam’s Club. Our refrigerator was empty, so it was that day of the month. I love Sam’s because in just a few items you purchase, the gravity of the entire planet shift towards you! Whatever it is that you buy, lasts for at least three weeks and then you just have to throw the rest away. Unless you are one of those cheaper by the dozen kind of families...
What I can not understand are the families that manage to get their carts so full, NASA has to re-compute satellite orbits as they move around the store. Can they actually eat all this stuff? And when they are ready to pay, you know any line they are at, will at least be three times as long as Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom’s Space Mountain’s line. So when I went to pay today, I first went by the little cafeteria and got me an entire pizza for a snack and a book to read while I vacationed at the line. Sometimes the store manager is gracious enough to let me move one of those sofas in place, but today he was not on duty.
As I approached the dreaded checkout area, I noticed every line was packed with families striding carts filled with an entire supermarket on wheels. My “I don’t want to die of old age while I shop” gene kicked in and started to look for some hope. Some line that for pure luck could move faster than the one I was already in.
Either there was a God helping me, or just the devil tuning into the channel of my life, but then I see this line which looks like it is going to move way faster than the one I am in. However, after following my instinct for the first time and as I moved my semi-filled cart into this second lane, I noticed an even emptier line! A quick glance to my wife and two nods later, we are moving to the third line, quicker than anybody else, where a lady has as much stuff as I did. Clearly she was not in the business of fixing up supper for the entire Third World Countries and alien life on a few of Jupiter moons.
I could not believe it! It was just too good to be true! I was actually going to be able to exit the store with a few slices of pizza in a box!
But how naive can one be... A few minutes later and the old lady is still trying to pay when I see the cashier screaming like crazy a latin name. “What the heck is going on?” I wondered. All of a sudden a Mexican employee comes into the teller and starts to talk to the lady. It is hard for me to tune into the conversation, but like a true good puertorican with my super enhanced “chisming” ear (the power of being able to hear what is none of my business) I was able to grab that the old lady’s membership had expired a while ago.
Now, first of all lets analyze the first minutes of my life being maimed here. The old lady was trying to explain the North American teller her situation in Spanish, while the teller could only speak in English. This should have been resolved way quicker, but the idea was to let enough time for me to see a few of the other lines going by while these two fruitlessly talked about the expired membership in two totally incompatible languages.
Going back to the present, the Mexican employee was talking to the old lady. At the moment it still seemed like I was actually going to pay on this line before than if I had stayed on the other lines. So I now tune to the conversation even more (Thank God for my puertorican powers!). The Sam’s employee is explaining the lady, her membership has expired. The lady tells the employee, she already paid last year. The teller then (as if talking to a kinder garden boy of negative five years of age who’s brain has been removed because it was genetically impaired) explains that the membership has to be renewed. EVERY YEAR!
And this makes perfect sense to me! But apparently it does not to every body else on this planet... The teller explained the phenomenon at least a few hundred times. And so did the old lady explained she had already paid for it last year. It went on and on until every other line on every other Sam’s Club in the entire western hemisphere had recycled a few dozen times and then...
Finally the Sam’s employee allows the old lady to pay without the membership, and the transaction is completed! By then I was facing dehydration and all my goods had already expired so I had to go back shopping. But I assure you! Every single line on that store paid their goods before I did! Damn bastard Murphy! He was right...
