It is not uncommon that when Dodo and I go to Wally World, the cashiers screw something up as a religious habit. Today it was taken to a whole new level.

But, let us start from the beginning by the personal hygiene products. As Dodo was perusing the aisles for some shampoo I bore witness to a most amusing spectacle. A young teenage couple were near the condoms. The girl was standing several feet away from the rubber racks, kind of behind another stand up display. Her boyfriend was eagerly selecting various boxes of condoms and showing them to the blatantly embarassed girl, looking for some sort of approval, but receiving only the girl hiding her eyes in nervous shame. (Personally I felt like striding over there with a confident swagger and selecting the cheapest box of condoms and saying in a booming voice, “Spermicidal Lubricant with a resevoir tip! Ribbed for her Pleasure!”)

And that’s not all!! Dodo and I like to get these little coffe drinks that are usually cheap, but the price had gone up. I found a bigger bottle of amaretto flavor product and selected that for our beverage. Then we were browsing the dollar bins and came up with a pair of tongs. We had a conversation at that point about the UPC not being legible and how we should say they were 50 cents. At the checkout lane, the lady working rang all the stuff up fine until she got to the tongs and could not ring it up because of the UPC. There was already a line accumulating while she was ringing up, now there was quite a parade behind us.

The cashier is complaining to herself about how she could not ring it up and blah blah blah, and walks off to get help from another cashier. At this time I give Dodo the amaretto drink and she sits on a bench and starts sipping on it. After a couple of sips she comes back and is complaining about how it is too sweet. I take a couple of sips and thoughtfully reflect how it IS quite sweet and doesn’t taste good.

The lady behind us is by now getting completely frustrated and the cashier comes back with no better idea how to handle the situation and asks if I will go get another pair of tongs! I do so, but the UPC on the other pair is bad too! From this point she tries to get the number by combining the two but there is one number missing. I tell her to just forget the tongs, but she seems to not hear a word I say and walks off to ask for help again! The lady behind us probably would have opened fire with an automatic rifle providing she had one. The flames in her eyes were clear. Oh, yeah. The amaretto drink. After carefully studying the label, I noticed that Dodo and I had been sipping coffee creamer in line the whole time! No wonder it was so damn sweet!

The result of the $1 tong incident: she rings it up as a $1 item from housewares. That’s it. She could have done that from the very beginning, but somehow she decided to waste 10 minutes of everybody’s time over some cheapo tongs.

What’s the moral of the story? If anyone believes education is not important, remember that there is a $7.00 per hour job waiting for you at Wal-Mart to work with such geniuses as the fine intellectual which botched the most basic task of ringing up some $1 tongs. STAY IN SCHOOL!