GETTING THE DROP ON HER

For weeks now I’ve been plagued by the Supermarket Nazi. It is a woman about middle 60’s and very bossy. It seems if I got into my local Waldbaum’s, and all I have is a few items, she will track me down and make me come over to the self-help scanner.

I don’t particularly like the darn thing, because it shouts out instructions to me in a very authoritative voice, sounding like my old first grade teacher Old Miss Langin. Old Miss Langin was a mean old witch who once threw me in a dark cloakroom because she thought she heard me say something, when I didn’t. (It must have been her knees cracking) She even called me a: "Bold, brazen chatterbox”! Me, at 6 years old, wasn’t even allowed to talk at home, let alone in a classroom. Seems the old hag died the next year while I was in second grade, and I went to her wake to make sure she was dead. Then went to her funeral Mass because I went to a Catholic school that she taught me in. Got the whole morning off from class!

But as they say: “ I digress.”

The Supermarket Nazi will always scan the other checkout lines to see who has a little that can be scanned by the self-help machine. It seems she is always catching me trying to slip by on one of the lines with real people, and she calls me over all the time. SN (The Supermarket Nazi) is not very tall, maybe 5 feet high and has a slight weight problem, wears glasses and sneaks up on the mirror every morning when she shaves. She has a very bossy demeanor and is mean or meaner, more or less.

I seriously contemplated getting a wagon, filling it with stuff and getting on a line, then when she looks away, ditching wagon as I got to the checkout girl.

Yesterday I needed Chinese noodles to complete a dish I was making for dinner, and all I had was the one item. I wanted to challenge her once more and drifted toward the checkout line without getting on. Sure enough she found some other husband who shouldn’t have been there and while she worked him over, I went through the checkout process, paid the cashier and slipped out, waving the plastic bag with my sole purchase in her face, almost doing a victory dance on the way out the automatic doors!

Victory was mine.

Score your own victory, write to:
joedelbroccolo@yahoo.com
tell ‘em: “get the hell out of here.”