[torontocbm] Re: Tractor feed paper.
- From: Jim Brain <brain@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: torontocbm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2019 19:43:34 -0500
On 8/17/2019 7:13 PM, Duke Nukem wrote:
Jim, are you attending the WOC this year? If so then I would like to
buy a few key items like the useful EF3 and Zoomfloppy to begin with.
Well, one can't absolutely promise these things, but yes, I am planning
to attend. The last few years have been spotty due to kids events and
such, but I think this year is pretty open. In any event, it's been too
long, and I miss the event (and, I miss seeing how US and CA are similar
but different, to humo(u)rous note).
Case in point:
Saturday night after the first day of the show, must have been 2017,
later in the evening, and I stopped at the Metro (why does a grocery
store have a name like it's a railway station?) to grab some snackies
for the rest of the weekend. Can't find sweet tea at all (you people
are truly deprived) but managed to scoop up some Hostess and Dew (I
think you all can't have the leaded kind, so unleaded it was) along with
some chips and such. Given the day's sales and spare change I could not
convert from previous visits, I had some Canuck cash and coin, thus I
wanted to draw down on foreign cash reserves. But, I rolled out of the
food aisles right next to the self checkout lines. I looked at the
checkout system and it had like 50 openings to put various currency into
(coins in here, plastic there, paper somewhere else, etc.) It had been
a long day, and I am not used used to the machine, so I decided I'd muck
that up if I tried. I started my way down to a helpful manned checkout
lane, only to have that lady say "Sir, we have self checkout lanes right
by you. It'd be easier to use them." Thanks, stereotypically helpful
Canadian citizen, but I don't quite understand your currency and I'd
rather not remind everyone in the GTA tonight that I'm not from around
these parts. I kept walking towards her with the friendliest "thanks,
but no thanks" smile I could muster. She was not deterred. She then
motioned to someone else behind me. "Sam, can you help this person use
the self checkout line?" At that point, I wanted to drop my food spoils
and just melt into the concrete, but no, Sam was right there steering me
into the automatics. Sigh... He then assumed that I did not know how to
use a self checkout line, so he proceeded to explain everything to me in
excruciating detail. Whether he thought I was a generally clueless local
or a stereotypically inept 'Murican, I have no idea. I just wanted it
to be over. I had wanted to ditch the "loonies" and "toonies", but was
too scared to put them in the wrong mechanical orifice, so I just handed
over paper (which I think is really plastic, but I digress) to Sam and
he fed it into the machine, as if I have never done so and could not
fathom how to shove paper bills into a slot. As I recall, he then made
some passing comment to whether I wanted a plastic bag, since those are
10 quid or something bizarre, but then he decided I didn't have that
many items, and they would all fit into a baglet, which evidently was
free (or maybe he was taking pity on me and my inability to fathom that
Canada charges for bags). The exchange took probably 3 minutes, as you
all are efficient at your tasks, but it felt like an eternity. I
stepped outside that establishment into the crisp Winter air, shuffled
to my Smart car with my baglet, sat down in the vehicle, and
re-evaluated my life. I realize I had been such a poor representative
of scrappy American ingenuity. Those poor Metro folks probably wondered
how I even managed to live long enough to make it to the store from the
States.
Jim
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