I was doing a little supper shopping today at Island Foods up the road. Had my little baby cart half filled with about anything that didn\u2019t seem double-the-price and fell in behind a lady whose overflowing groceries indicated a resident who didn\u2019t worry much about little things like prices or specials or coupon discounts. If she\u2019d been sporting a mink coat, I wouldn\u2019t have expected less.<\/p>\n
Tina, the checkout clerk on register #4, the one labeled \u2018Utsalady\u2019 as a nod to our island\u2019s sketchy history, was scanning items faster than a TSA agent on meth. She turned to Marie Antoinette and said in her usual cheerful greeting, \u2018How you doing today?\u2019 By this time Zsa Zsa had a smart phone in her bejeweled ear and ignored Tina as any High Lady would when an impudent commoner affronted her status. M\u2019lady was now occupied with a conversation about the horrific traffic resulting from a fender bender we\u2019d both apparently passed earlier. It had been a terrible inconvenience to her schedule for Tea Time.<\/p>\n
They say time is money, but they\u00a0don’t\u00a0say it on the South End. Tina, who lives half a mile north of me in a small ghetto subdivided with a zoning variance that made some commissioner\u2019s friends rich, well, Tina makes minimum wage plus a buck. Time, I seriously doubt, is mostly money to her. It\u2019s a bad back, varicose veins and a wrist brace for her\u00a0carpal tunnel syndrome that will soon doom her fabulous career. Half the people she checks out never say boo to her. A quarter are on their cellphone. A few are just unfriendly like she<\/span><\/em> was price gouging them.. And the rest don\u2019t see or hear her, she\u2019s just the checkout girl.<\/p>\n Tina has a husband, Billy, used to be a contractor before he crushed a disk in his spine that ended his<\/span> <\/em>career. He gets some disability and between that and Tina\u2019s largesse, they make the payments on their double-wide, but barely. It\u2019s a scrape every damn month, but I\u2019ve never heard her complain. She\u2019s glad to have this job. \u201cYou have a nice day!\u201d she smiles to Her Majesty who\u2019s still chattering on her cell. Tina turns to me and asks happily, \u201cHow\u2019s it going, Skeeter?\u201d If she and I weren\u2019t happily married, I swear to God I\u2019d propose to her on the spot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was doing a little supper shopping today at Island Foods up the road. Had my little baby cart half filled with about anything that didn\u2019t seem double-the-price and fell in behind a lady whose overflowing groceries indicated a resident who didn\u2019t worry much about little things like prices or specials or coupon discounts. If […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[6414,6412,6413],"class_list":["post-17634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-cellphone-snubs","tag-checkout-at-island-foods","tag-shopping-with-the-snobs"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17634"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17635,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17634\/revisions\/17635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}