Friday Report

This is a neat installation from the NC Museum of Art. From far away, the faces seem indistinct, but the closer you get, the more individualized they become.

Today I went grocery shopping. I bought lots of groceries. At the checkout, the cashier, who was actually a store manager, rang up my groceries and I bagged. For some reason, my neighborhood grocery store doesn't have people who automatically bag your groceries, so you have two choices, wait for the cashier to ring up your groceries and then bag them, or else you can bag them while the cashier is ringing things up.

I always bag, because a) that way the hamburger buns never end up squished on the bottom; and b) it makes the process go much, much faster.

So today the cashier rang and I bagged, and we chatted a bit about the weather (it's raining today after weeks of no rain at all). We'd gotten about two-thirds the way through my groceries when the power went out. It came right back on (there must be store generators), but the computer screen on the cash register didn't. Other cash register screens powered up again, but not ours.

I looked at my bagged groceries and said, "This is probably the best bagging job I've ever done, and now we'll have to start over."

(Another cashier walking past said, "It's sort of like winning at Tetris when you get everything packed in just right.")

The cashier and I chatted and joked as we waited hopefully for the cash register to start working again. I offered her a bagel (I had just bought a baker's dozen at Breuggers and the bag was in my grocery cart). She joked that we should go get a cup of coffee as long as we had to wait. I wondered if I should start unpacking my groceries so we could go to another register and start the process over.

She looked at me and shook her head. "Keep your groceries in your bags. We'll just ring up the rest of them on a register that works and that's what you'll pay today."

We decided to ring up the meat again, because I'd bought two pork loins (they were on sale) and three pounds of organic chicken, and that was a lot of meat to be giving away for free. But otherwise, the orange juice and the pretzels and the lettuce and the Wheat Chex and Life Cereal and milk and half and half and the brown basmati rice and all sorts of nice things were mine for the taking, no charge.

One of my favorite expressions is "Good news, bad news, who knows?" It seemed like bad news when the power went out, but it turned out to be good news indeed.