As is our routine, I was out and about relatively early this morning walking the pooch.  Early was good today, since we managed to beat the rain.  Whew. 

Puppydog and I were standing at a corner waiting to cross a street.  Two cars proceeded through a stop sign while we stood there.  Well, I stood.  Puppydog sat rather nicely.  The third car in line, however, motioned for us to cross the street while she waited.  Yay for the nice driver.

Then, a bit later, when I was out running a zillion and two errands, I stopped at Ralph Miller Jewelers to get a new battery for my watch.  It’s just a cheap Timex, and old, too, and looks like it has clearly seen better days, but it works like a charm (when the battery isn’t dead) and it’s nice and plain looking, just the way I like a watch.  I handed the watch over to the woman behind the counter and she told me it would be just a few minutes.  I then proceeded to look at all the shiny sparklies.  And they had some lovely shiny sparklies.  The only two kinds of stores I can spend any length of time in without losing my mind are book stores and jewelry stores.  I didn’t even get to look at everything they had to offer before the woman returned to the counter and told me my watch was done.  And the best part?  She buffed the scratches out of the crystal.  For FREE!  It looks like a brand new watch. 

Finally, on my second to last errand of the day, I stopped at the Whole Foods Cooperative with the main purpose of the stop being to get the pooch her favorite peanut butter (the freshly ground stuff they have in the back in the bulk section).  Although it looks a little, um, disgusting when it comes out of the dispenser, it tastes awesome.  On rare occasions, the pooch actually lets us have some of her peanut butter.  I also picked up two other items (a tofurkey habañero wrap for lunch and a bag of BBQ crinkle cut chips that were on sale) and proceeded to the check-out area.  There were two lanes open and I got in the lane that was lacking customers (there was one woman in the other lane unpacking her loot from her cart onto the conveyor).  However, the woman running the register of the lane I picked apologized profusely, but said she had to shut her lane down to help another customer at the service desk (he was an elderly gentleman who was trying to return something and didn’t seem to have his receipt).  Not a problem.  I wasn’t in any particular hurry and the customer in the other lane didn’t have a ton of stuff, so the wait would not be long.

I proceeded to get in line behind the other customer who had finished unloading all of her groceries and, as I reached for the little stick to put on the conveyor to divide our orders, she spoke to me.

“Oh, no, honey… you don’t have to wait for me.”  She then turned to the cashier.  “You ring her out first.  She only has those three items.” 

“Are you sure?”  I asked the woman.  “It’s okay.  I can wait.” 

“No, there’s no reason for you to stand there and wait for me.  You go on ahead.” 

I thanked the woman profusely, as standing there are debating the issue was only going to waste everyone’s time.

The cashier rung me out very quickly and, after telling her I didn’t need a bag for my three little items, I again thanked the other customer, bid both her and the cashier a good day, and left the store. 

Of course, my day was also spattered with some assholes, too… all those people running stop signs and red lights (one nearly hit me at a four-way stop a/k/a an “all-play” or a “free-for-all”).  But those encounters fazed me much less yesterday than they normally would.  I guess I was just too high on nice for the assholes to bring me down. 

June 17th, 2009 | Category: Consumerism, Driving, Erie, Walking | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL