SUNDAY AT THE BIG BOX STORE

SUNDAY AT THE BIG BOX STORE

I played hooky yesterday from just about everything. I forced myself to do a couple of loads of laundry just so I wouldn’t sit up all night chastising myself for general sloth.

Among other wild goose chases yesterday, Art and I went to a “big box” home improvement store. We didn’t find most of what we wanted. Isn’t that always the way)? But we had a couple of very small items. Rather than wait in the line that went out the door and around the block for the (human) cashier, we decided to try the automated cashier.

Have you ever done this? Perhaps this is an innovation that has not hit your hometown yet. Just wait.

You still stand in line, of course, but the line is shorter. We found out why.

A disembodied voice that seems to emanate from the heavens welcomes you. In our case, it welcomed us in Spanish. We looked at the computer screen, and sure enough, all the written instructions were in Spanish. Now, I speak a little Spanish, so I probably could have struggled my way through it – but Art doesn’t speak Spanish, and besides, even if we could have figured it all out, there were about five people waiting behind us, and we were very afraid of their reaction if they were kept waiting in line for half an hour while we tried to translate.

Art called over to the young woman who was seated in a kind of catbird perch about ten feet away. She was kind of the overseer for the whole operation. He asked her if she would please change the machine to English, since no matter what he did, he couldn’t seem to knock it out of Spanish mode. She said she couldn’t do that, so Art struggled with the thing for another two or three minutes while the people behind us rolled their eyes, tapped their toes, hummed, and swore under their breath. Art called out to the young woman again, and this time she said, “Okay”. A few seconds later, the machine greeted us in English so that we could start all over again.

It asked us to scan our item. Art scanned the item. Then it said, “Place the item in the bagging area”, and Art had already started to scan the next item, but the machine refused to scan the next item until the first item was in the bag. Somehow, in the confusion of the moment, Art mistakenly scanned the first item twice. He had to call out to the young overseer again, and she started the whole process over.

Finally, Art was able to successfully scan the first item, drop it in the bag, and scan the second item, then drop it in the bag. (I can’t figure out how the darn thing knows whether or not you have bagged your item). Finally, we were able to walk out of the store, receipt in hand. Of course, we had to stop at the door for a security check. Then we were on our way.

Looking back to the first line which we had eschewed for the automated line, I noticed that we would have been long gone already, had we opted to go that way.

I don’t know about you, but for Art and me, I think we’ll stick with the old fashioned kind of cashier. And maybe next time we’ll skip the “big box” concept altogether and go to our local hardware store. At least there we don’t have to dodge the forklifts.

© 2005, Robin Munson

RAIN ON THE DESERT

RAIN ON THE DESERT

Last night the rains came.

We live in Southern California, which is, in fact, a desert community. Of course, no one ever thinks about Southern California as a desert community, because we siphon off water from the Colorado River and use it to irrigate our green lawns and fill our swimming pools. We import plants from every climate imaginable and root out most of the cactus. The other day when Art and I went for a walk I saw a great big ball of twigs floating towards us. “Isn’t that tumbleweed?” I asked. Tumbleweed is probably native to Los Angeles, whereas the ubiquitous palm trees are not.

But most winters, we can count on a certain amount of rain. Mercifully, we only get a few good downpours, and the rest comes in drips and drabs. Last night we got a storm worthy of Tennessee or Kansas. The rain pounded down so heavily that I thought it would break right through the roof. It came down so hard that several times my husband, Art, had to go out and drain the water from the swimming pool lest it flood the back of the house. We even got lightning and thunder last night – bright and loud!

Naturally, since we live in the hills, we lost our power. (I don’t mean our personal power – I mean our electricity). This means that not only did all of the lights go out, but our heat went out, our electric hot water heater went out, the cable went out, and the ringer on our phone went out so that we couldn’t tell if anyone was calling.

As we dragged out our flashlights, our candles, and our forty-dollar black and white television set with the six-inch screen that runs on eight D-cell batteries, I had this vision of us as pioneers back in the covered wagon days. For the first time maybe in my whole life I began to appreciate what brave, indomitable spirits these people must have had. Even in sunny California, the sun goes down at 4:30 in the afternoon on December 28th, so that even though we were far from ready to go to bed, there was almost nothing else we could do! At least we had our battery-operated lights and our little almost-worthless TV to keep us sane. Those poor people had nothing.

Anyway, when the sun went down I walked into our darkened kitchen with my flashlight and opened the warm refrigerator. I found some eggs and figured I had better use them up before they went bad. I lit the stove with a log lighter (thank God that’s a gas appliance, although it has an electric starter). I fumbled in my cabinets and got out the necessary bowl and a pan and managed to make us an omelet, some bread and butter, and some steamed broccoli.

We sat down by candlelight and ate our humble dinner at 5:00. We straightened up the kitchen as best we could with cold water in the dark. Then we settled down on the couch in the living room and tried to drown out the sound of the pounding rain with the noise of our little TV. We couldn’t make out what the people were saying and there were multiple ghosts fogging the image on the one channel we could get, but the light from the TV, if not the content of the programming, was somewhat comforting. I even took out my crocheting, put a flashlight on my fingers, and made a little progress on my afghan. Art picked up his guitar and plinked on it for a couple of hours. We both kept staring at that miniscule screen.

That’s where we were sitting at ten o’clock when the power was finally restored. After only a few hours of being power-less, as it were, I was pretty rattled. This morning when we woke up and turned on the news we learned that there had indeed been at least one tornado in the area. Trees had been uprooted and cars had been smashed. Roads had been flooded. Homes had been damaged. There may be more to come before it’s all over.

It occurs to me what a thin veneer of progress separates our “modern” culture from that of the cavemen. If you think we’ve “come a long way, baby” – Think again. Try cutting off your own electricity for about six hours, and see what happens. You may find yourself wondering if that howling wind is indeed a manifestation of angry gods. You may wonder what you can do to appease said angry gods. You may find yourself growing edgy, bored, and anxious – all at the same time. Amazing to think that all of our supposed sophistication can be wiped out, literally, at the flick of a switch. Try it. It will give you new appreciation for the Amish.

© 2004, Robin Munson