Ugh, this story reminds me of an idiot who wanted to buy cigarettes when I was working during the global health crisis.
Customer: “These are [amount around thirty cents] more a pack than they were last time! This is price-gouging! You should be ashamed of yourself!”
No, honey, that’s inflation, not price gouging.
Somehow, I was not, in fact, ashamed of myself.
I’m thirty-nine, and I do the grocery shopping for my parents, who I live with — mainly because I have the time, but also because I enjoy it. It gets me away from the house, and I’m a bit of an organizational nerd. I enjoy playing grocery “Tetris” in the cart. I like finding deals. I enjoy clipping coupons. I even have a list of each aisle and what’s on it for maximum grocery list planning! So, my grocers know me. They recognize me. If they don’t see me for a while, they charge up like my favorite auntie, hands on hips, asking, “Where have you been? Why haven’t you been in to see me?” I love my store.
This happened a few years ago, around the first year of the global health crisis. I stopped in to pick up a few things. I had written things down a bit out of order because I’d scribbled it while I was at work. I had my store “map”, though, and was consulting it when I nearly bumped into an older gentleman. When I say, “older”, I don’t mean fifties; this man was closer to eighty. He apologized and seemed flustered, so I asked him if he was all right.
Gentleman: *Despairingly* “I’m lost. I can’t find [simple item].”
I glanced at my “map” to confirm before telling him which aisle. He thanked me, and then, completely bereft and almost seeming to give up, he said:
Gentleman: “My wife used to do the shopping for us. Fifty years. She’s been gone a month, and I don’t know how to do this.”
My heart instantly broke.
Me: “What else are you looking for?”
He showed me his list. I accompanied him while we found all the items he’d come looking for and a few others. It wasn’t much — the bare essentials for a single man for the week — and we were done in about fifteen minutes.
As we shopped, we talked. His wife had caught [contagious illness] and fought for almost four weeks before passing away. I ended up giving him my “map”, hoping it would help him as he acclimated to this new task. As he headed for the checkout and I prepared to go back to my shopping (I still only had two or three of my own items in my basket), I heard him say to one of the floor managers:
Gentleman: “That young lady right there deserves a raise.”
The floor manager smiled at me.
Manager: “Oh, I’d love to, but she doesn’t work here.”
The old man looked at me, tears in his eyes, and thanked me. I told him I was happy to do it.
I still am. It’s been three years, and I still think about him from time to time, wondering and worrying about whether he’s okay.
I work in the front-end department of a large grocery chain here in Canada. I’m usually a cashier, but one day, I was watching the doors. My job was to keep track of how many customers were in the store, tell people they had to wear a mask, and make sure the stand that held disinfectant wipes for carts and hand sanitizer was stocked.
This particular day wasn’t too busy, and we didn’t have a line of people waiting to get in, so most people just walked up to the doors, got their carts, and went inside. It wasn’t mandatory to wipe the handlebars OR use hand sanitizer.
An older woman came in and, while she was disinfecting her hands, another customer walked in behind her and straight into the store.
The woman scoffed and turned on me.
Woman: “You shouldn’t have let that lady in! She didn’t use hand sanitizer!”
Me: “It’s not mandatory for a number of reasons. Every sanitizer uses different ingredients, some of which some people are allergic to, so making it mandatory would be endangering those people. Plus, a lot of people, me included, use personal sanitizers that we prefer to the generic one on the stand.”
Woman: *Livid* “I’m over eighty years old and at high risk!”
I stayed quiet until she went into the store, but then I turned to my coworker who was bringing in the carts.
Me: “If you’re at such a risk, don’t come shopping.”
He agreed, and we went back to our jobs, thinking that was the end of it.
But the woman came back and chewed me out more for not enforcing that everyone had to use disinfectant. I told her, again, that our only mandatory rule was that everyone had to wear a mask. She repeated that she was old and at risk, and I repeated why we couldn’t make it mandatory.
She scoffed and turned to exit the store. I was able to tell her she was going the wrong way and that the exit was at the other door. She ignored me, of course, and left without buying anything.
She came out to a busy grocery store, complained that we were putting her at risk, and didn’t get anything. We most definitely weren’t putting her at risk. She was with her actions.
My boss and I had a disagreement about working from home this week. The office is in San Francisco. I live in the East Bay and need to cross the Bay Bridge to get to work.
We had an important presentation scheduled today. I wanted to do it “virtual” because the APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] meeting is in SF this week, and everything seems disrupted. President Biden and Chinese President Xi are here. It’s a two-hour commute on a typical day, and I told my boss it might not be feasible to come in this week.
He insisted I come in.
Me: “Okay, but don’t blame me if I get stuck in traffic.”
We had a pretty heated discussion about it.
Today there’s a huge backup on every freeway toward the Bay Bridge because protesters have chained themselves across all five lanes. The bridge is completely closed.
Now, the boss wants me to do the presentation “virtual”.
Me: “I can’t. I’m stuck in traffic. I can’t operate my vehicle and do the presentation. You will have to do it without me.”
(But he isn’t really qualified.)
The presentation ended up being rescheduled.
Disclaimer: This story contains content of a medical nature. It is not intended as medical advice.
Back during the panic-buying phase of the global health crisis, the flapper in my toilet broke, and I had to make a run to the hardware store.
While there, it occurred to me to check the filter masks aisle. At the time, the focus for masks was on self-protection, not protecting others from you, so valved respirators looked like a great idea.
All the dust masks — useless for blocking [contagious illness] transmission either way — were sold out. My guess is that people saw them as a bargain. All the N95 masks were sold out. But there was a full rack of N100 disposable masks untouched, and they had five entire cases — twenty-five masks per case — of reusable P100 respirator masks.
People were actually avoiding the masks that were better than N95 because they never bothered to learn what the alphanumeric code meant; they just panic-bought N95s.
I actually helped this grandfather-type pick out enough P100 masks for his entire family. He had no idea P100 was better than N95, and we both took a moment to boggle at the five cases of P100s left untouched.
The local drugstore had similar craziness; all concentrations of ethyl and isopropyl alcohol were gone, but the shaving section had cleaning cartridges for electric shavers, and those cartridges were between 85% and 90% alcohol.
Likewise, the store’s stock of povidone-iodine was completely untouched; povidone-iodine is thirty times more effective at killing [illness] than 80% ethyl alcohol is.
The whole thing was utter madness.
