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December 15, 2001-5:13 p.m. Hell is a small-town Wal-Mart during the holidays. Today, I woke up at a decent hour and wrote out the Christmas cards that had to be mailed. I got most of those finished and ready to mail before my hair appointment. I went over to my mom�s house to tell her that I was going for my hair appointment and then to Wal-Mart for my weekly grocery shopping. She decided that she would not go along because I was getting color as well as a cut and she didn�t want to sit there that long but she did want to go to Wal-Mart. Being the stellar daughter that I am, I told her I would come back and get her when my hair was done. My friend Larry called me while I was driving to the salon, while I was at the salon, once I was in the truck after my hair appointment and while I was at Wal-Mart. He really needs to get a life! My mom and I get to the Wal-Mart and the place is jammed with wall-to-wall bona fide Spam-sucking trailer trash, no doubt looking for Chia Pets or some Ronco item �As seen on TV.� I needed to pick up a prescription and the line was fairly long due to the pharmacist having just returned from lunch. There was an elderly Amazon woman behind me who complained incessantly about how she had �had to wait yesterday and that wasn�t in her plans for today� and �They get all our money. You�d think they could afford to put on another worker.� We were mercifully able to cut that encounter short when they opened another window at the pharmacy. The rest of our shopping experience was fairly uneventful until we went to leave and something we had set off the alarm. It ended up being a battery that my mom had bought for my dad�s drill. The woman who checked our parcels was probably God�s sister judging from her age. She scanned our item and wrote something in a logbook and we were on our way again. As we exited the store, the alarm again went off but we said, �She�s already checked us� and kept walking. A man that had been walking behind us, stopped us and said, �That�s fine until you try to go back into the store with that item and it sets it off again.� I explained to the kind gentleman that the likelihood of us going back into the Wal-Mart with a drill battery on our person was slim to nil. The man then felt it necessary to follow us a few feet and tell us this delightful anecdote: He was in Germany and everyday he would go to this place and everyday he would set the alarm off. He carried a backpack and after this had happened several times he decided to go through his backpack in an effort to determine which of his possessions was causing this phenomenon. Finally after searching high and low, the offending item was determined to be a box of Tums (antacid, for you non-Americans) that still had the inventory tag attached to it. Once this was removed, he never had any more trouble! I know you were all just as riveted as I was by this cautionary tale! So here I am, four Excedrins later, vowing not to return to Wal-Mart until after Christmas. We�ll see how successful I am at keeping that promise to myself. Time enough now for a short nap before the nephews arrive to spend tonight and all day tomorrow testing the bounds of my sanity! **Disclaimer: All characters in this diary are fictional. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, real or imagined, is purely coincidental and unintentional.** |
