Why I Can Never Go Anywhere.

Tell me someone else has this experience every time they visit a store:

You’ve finally managed to locate everything you stopped by the store to buy. You’ve spent the last thirty minutes elbowing your way through the hordes of people that insist on stopping right in the middle of the aisle you’re walking through. You’ve dodged all of the children who are running rampant through the store because heaven forbid their good-for-nothing parent discipline them. You’ve stepped over the puddle of urine where some child let loose on the floor because a stock boy called her stupid.

You finally get into line to check-out, but even now the battle is only half over, because the next half hour of your time is going to be spent being asses-to-elbows with the rudest, most inept people on Earth. The most inept ones, you soon realize, are all in front of you. The basic economic concept of being able to exchange money for goods and services seems to escape these people. You wonder if any of them just woke up after being in a coma for 20 years and this is their first time ever in a store. Person after bumbling person steps into line and either forgets something they needed until the cashier has already totaled everything; or is aghast at the price of some item they clearly misconstrued as being on sale.

Everything has finally been rung up for this idiot, and now it’s time to pay. They unfailingly either need to write a check, or try to pay with a credit or debit card that you know is getting rejected. Evidently, you have stumbled into a dimension where cash no longer exists.

What makes this wait in line even more painful are the people behind you becoming increasingly impatient, and not afraid to vent these frustrations verbally to the imaginary people in line who care how they feel.

By the time it is finally your turn in line; the three or four people behind you are ready to lose their minds. On account of you not being completely retarded, you quickly send your items through the scanner, and even bag them yourself in the interest of getting the hell out of Dodge as quickly as possible.

And then it happens.

The cashier (who clearly is no descendant of Einstein either) does something to exacerbate your pain. He either drops and breaks something you want to buy, or scans an item twice, or gets the deer-in-headlights look on his face because you brought him something like a banana that doesn’t have a bar-code to scan.

Now we wait for another five to ten minutes for the manager to come and fix boy-genius’ mistake.

With everything now sorted out, you’re in the home stretch. You pay cash for your goods, and quietly thank God that the register tells this chimp how much change to give you. In one fluid motion, the cashier tears off your receipt, crumbles it together with the bills, and stuffs the coins inside this mess as if they are the creamy middle of a Cadbury egg. He then shoves this hot mess into your hand so clumsily that your creamy middle falls on the floor.

From here, you can feel the heat from the rage of the people behind you, and you have a panic attack trying to pick your change up off the ground and stumble out of the way before the person behind you commits a felony with your balls.

You climb into your car and make your way home, swearing the whole way that you’ll never go back to that store again as long as you live, but you know damn well that you’ll be back the very next time you need something.

You repeat this process time and time again, week after week, month after month, year after year, until finally you’re alone in your bathroom one night and a blood vessel explodes in your brain, killing you instantly.