It began when the two women in the queue ahead of me paid for their groceries. Collecting $115.00 in cash, the cashier – a pretty girl of around 20 – hesitated, then set the bills down across the open register drawer.
She’d spotted something wrong with the receipt.
She picked the cash up a couple of times and put it down. She looked at the tape, then the money, then the tape.
The line waited patiently as the minutes dragged on. The man behind me picked up a magazine. The young women waiting chatted. I stood and watched.
Finally, the young cashier picked up the internal phone to summon help. After she hung up the receiver, she pulled out a cell phone and tapped at it in her right hand, glancing occasionally at the white strip of paper still in her left.
(That’s odd, I thought…. texting at work?)
Just as the supervisor arrived, she announced, “It’s ok, I got it”, and the woman departed. But she hadn’t “got it”. She hesitated. She fumbled with the receipt.
Out came the cell phone again.
Finally, she accepted defeat. After a second call, the supervisor returned, surveyed the problem tape … and then took out her cell phone.
Together, they consulted over the device.
After a few moments the supervisor announced “$2.79”, and walked away.
The cashier placed the two $50’s and three $5’s in their compartments, and withdrew a few coins for the women still waiting to leave. Over ten minutes had passed.
As she began to ring my stuff through, I asked, “Were you just trying to make change?”
She replied, “yes”.
I looked her in the eye. “Whoever your teachers were in school, you need to hunt them down and kick them to death.”
“It’s been a long time since I did math”.
“That isn’t ‘math’. That is ‘life’. You need to learn how to make change”.
And I left to resume work on the fallout shelter.