Patience is a Virtue

If the title of this blog entry is true, then I am not a virtuous woman. I have no patience at all. None. I am horrendous with waiting in lines, waiting for traffic, waiting for anything. On top of that, I have no patience for ignorant people or people who work in stores who don't know how or don't want to do their jobs.

Today I had to go to the grocery store. In Salem. On a Saturday. The kiss of death. Salem is so overcrowded that on a Saturday I would like to hibernate like a little bear and not step foot out of my driveway......which I usually can't anyway because God forbid people read the sign that says "Do Not Block Intersection" and leave a space when they're sitting there waiting for the light so us poor people who live in this condo complex can actually get out of our driveway and get into the traffic line of people waiting for the light. (I think that might have been a run-on sentence.)

Anywho......what was I ranting about? Oh yea......the grocery store. The worst part was, I didn't even need groceries. I've finally figured out how to arrange my grocery shopping so I don't go on the weekends. I try to plan enough so I get everything I need on Friday and don't have to go again until Monday. But I needed quarters for the washing machine.

Yes, we have to pay for our laundry. Even though we have a nice laundry room downstairs so we don't have to go to the laundrymat, they put in coin-operated machines so now we have to make sure there's enough quarters every time we do laundry, which in this day and age is hard because we never use cash, we only use debit cards so we dont' have a nice big jar of coins that we've saved by emptying our pockets every night like my father used to do when I was a kid. I never have enough quarters so I have to go to Market Basket and buy some groceries so I can ask for $10 over on my debit card so I can then go to the service window and exchange my $10 bill for a roll of quarters, and of course on a Saturday God forbid they should have more than one person at the "service" window and I had to wait forever for my quarters.

Huh? Oh yea.....the groceries. So I bought a few groceries and got the slowest, stupidest bag boy. Always. I ALWAYS get the slowest, stupidest bag boy. The one who likes to talk. Not to the customer....but to his fellow bag boy. The conversation went like this:

Bag boy #1. "so yea...like....what's happenin' tonight?

Bag boy #2. "uhhhhhhhhhh.......don't know.

You get the idea. And of course, God forbid he talk and bag at the same time. no no no no no. Every time he talked, the bagging stopped.

So I had two cloth bags. Not so much because I care that much for the environment, but because I really hate those plastic bags and the cloth bags are easier to carry. I give the kid BOTH cloth bags and he starts bagging. I'm watching him, and he just keeps putting more and more and more things in the first bag. Finally I say, "You know, there are two bags. You don't have to put everything in one bag." He looks at me blankly, silently looks down at the bag, shrugs his shoulders, puts a couple more things in the bag!, and then finally puts it in my cart and puts the rest in the other bag.

The first bag had all this in it: (note the heavy containers of milk, juice and "tub o butter". The JJ pies are for Hubby....I swear to God I never eat them but he loves them and they only come out in the store every once in a while so when they do I buy a bunch of them.....I'm a good wife.....errr, enabler...... like that.)

And the second bag had this in it:

Now if I wanted to be a big bitch, I would have made him repack the bags. But there was a long line behind me because it was Saturday and God forbid anyone should do their grocery shopping on any other day of the week, and I knew how I'D feel if some bitch actually made the slowest bagger in the world repack the bags, so I just took them as is.

I really thought my arm would fall off as I walked to the car because of course the bag with the 30 pounds of groceries was NOT the one with the long handles that I could have put over my shoulder and carried like a Sherpa to the car. no no no no no. The long handled bag had the 3 ounces of groceries in it.

And of course I forgot where I parked my car and went down the wrong aisle and the car was on the other side which usually is fine because you can just walk over the little island but in NH in January there's a snow bank three feet high so I had to walk all the way around the island with one arm getting longer and longer with the weight of the over-packed bag until by the time I got to the car I looked like a gorilla on one side.

Now seriously, would you have had the patience for all that???