There are a lot of ways to earn a buck in this world. Some do it honestly, logging man-hours behind a desk, behind the wheel of a tractor, or behind a cash register. Others do it dishonestly, deciding to ditch the timesheet and opt for selling drugs, hawking loot on the black market, or kickin’ it old school and just stealing from others. Whichever way one decides to come by their livelihood really is none of my business (unless, of course, they are stealing from me). What is my business, however, is deciding what I wanted to make MY career out of. As a kiddo, there were just two professions I desperately wanted my turn at: a grocer, and a taxi driver.
Normally, when a kid ponders the jobs they might like to have in the future, their dreams are fraught with extravagance, money, and fame…an astronaut, a professional athlete, a famous actress, or the President of the United States to name a few of the most popular. But what fun is this blog entry if my dream job as a child were any of those boring things?
Uh, let me answer that question for you—it wouldn’t be any fun.
In the interest of your attention span I’m just going to discuss my dream to be a grocer in this post and a taxi driver in a separate one. Oh, and let me make a quick disclaimer for any grocers or taxi drivers that may be reading this: Even though I don’t want to be your colleague anymore, I beg of you to please not take a offense to my change of heart and start putting my eggs on the bottom of my grocery bag or taking me the longest route home possible from a night out at the bars. DON’T be a douche.
My dream of being the check stand lady at Fred Meyer began at the tender age of 6 years old. And boy, did that dream it hit me hard and did it hit me fast. I have always had a thing about keyboards—I’m not sure if it’s the clicking noise the keys make, or if I just like pushing buttons, but it satisfies an inexplicable urge in me. For example, whenever I go to an establishment like Best Buy or Office Depot, I immediately scoot myself on over to the computer section upon entering and type mindlessly on all the keyboards to figure out which one has the best clicking noises. It’s fantastic, even if no one else can understand it. Another symptom of this OCD tendency is that I type unnecessarily hard on keyboards. On more than one occasion the following conversation has ensued:
“Libby, are you mad at the keyboard or something?”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re just slamming on those keys…”
“You’re just slamming on those keys…”
“I just like the way it sounds slash feels, alright?! You’ll never understand me. Friendship over.”
End Scene.
As a result, I have totally glorified the machine known as the cash register. I so badly wanted to be able to glide the items through the scanner, clicking those buttons, and flipping up those little levers that hold the cash down.
Furthermore, I think that cashiers at grocery stores are given a unique glimpse into the lives of the American public. The food that people buy probably reveals a lot about them. Because folks, let’s be real…when the woman in line ahead of me at Freddy’s is buying (I kid you not) 20-25 frozen meals and 7 boxes of Ding Dongs with a side of cheesy bread and a 2-liter of Mountain Dew to wash it all down, you can infer a hell of a lot more about her lifestyle than simply that she prefers not to ingest artificial sweeteners. I’m not going to make those inferences for you because I don’t want to be completely rude, and I’m also going to assume my audience is intelligent enough to figure this one out. But that’s neither here nor there.
Let’s fast forward to the day that my dream died. The happy façade of being a grocer came to a crashing halt upon my first experience in the checkout line at Winco. I had never been to a supermarket establishment where you bagged your own groceries (though I had always dreamed such a day would come). So when I saw that we got to bag our purchases ourselves, I was overwhelmed with both anticipation and excitement….
Cut to 5 minutes later and I realized that bagging groceries TOTALLY SUCKS. After that, my love affair with a any sort of profession in the food service industry died a quiet (but permanent) death. So thank you, Winco. Thank you for not only your cheap groceries and delicious bulk candy that I sometimes steal a piece or two of, but thank you for turning me off to being a grocer forever, because I don’t think I would have liked it.
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