Blame seeking weapon
7-11. In front of me is a prime specimen of Macomb County White Trash; an ancient four foot tall raisin of a woman made entirely of sunburned wrinkles. She twitches constantly, talks to herself and is holding the Official Beer of Trumpistan: 32oz NattyDaddy. When she gets to the front counter she drops a dollar bill and a handful of change in front of the obligatory Pakistani woman working the register. The cashier is trying to figure out how to turn the can around so that she scan it without actually touching it, because apparently doing so will turn her into a newt or something. She is also trying to convey this desire to rotate said can to the ancient goblin on the other side of the pseudo-bulletproof plastic but sadly neither party speaks English very well. Eventually she manages to get it turned around, however, and scans the magic bar code on the frosty can of piss-water.
$1.57
The mummy grabs her can, skipping the brown paper bag that had yet to be offered, and heads off to do whatever it is she does when she’s not buying more beer. The cashier is staring at the pile of coins and has suffered a complete brain-lock. There are three people in line behind me. Now even from where I am standing I can tell that there is an entire second dollar’s worth of change there, but that’s because I can do things like 1st grade math in my head. The lady working the register apparently cannot.
She begins shuffling the coins around as if counting them, but she’s not. She’s just trying to sort them into piles. I pinch the bridge of my nose. She moves a quarter around and whispers “ten.” This is when my admittedly thin sense of patience runs out.
“Five dimes, seven pennies,” I say to her. She apparently doesn’t hear me. So I put my hand under the glass and point to the little piles she is making. I point to the dimes. “Five dimes,” I say, and then to the copper coins, “and seven pennies.” She waves her hands likes she’s trying to swat a bug, then grabs the quarter again and moves it to other side the piles. “Ten” she says when she slides it, and then says “two” when she grabs a dime and finally “three” when she grabs a nickle. Is she counting the number of coins? Is she getting the values wrong? What the fuck is going on in this woman’s head?
“Five dimes,” as I hold up fingers for her to see, “and seven pennies.” She looks back down and now it is clear as I look closer that she has four piles of coins but that dimes and pennies both exist in two of those piles. She doesn’t know the difference between them. They’re almost the same size, so to her, they’re the same coin.
Eventually she gives up because there are now five people in line behind me. She shovels all the change into one giant pile and pushes it off to the side in order to ring me up. I wisely pay with plastic.
At this point I would like to remind the audience of this woman’s job title: CASHIER.
Now before you all go into wokegasms of fury let me make something perfectly clear: As frustrated as I am with her, I am not angry with her, because this is not her fault. I get it. She comes from some miserable, backwards shit-hole where they don’t believe in educating women. She has been deprived of the opportunity to develop these basic life skills by a cruel and unjust world. She is the victim here. Nor should her handicap prevent her from being able to get a job and having a life. I get that, too.
I am angry at 7-11. In their eagerness to hire more tax breaks (that’s not a joke - I worked for that company and while I was there their management openly admitted that’s why they stack their ranks with people who’s last names are 27 letters long) they didn’t bother to do the most basic vetting of abilities. They went through the entire process of interviewing and (I would assume) training this woman to work the buttons of this machine without ever once checking to see if she could do addition and subtraction in her head, or if she could tell a penny from an admittedly filthy looking dime.
And again, it’s not that I think they shouldn’t have denied her a job opportunity. I just strongly believe that they should have given her a different job. Put on her on two person shifts and let her… do… other things. Sweep the parking lot. Refill the ice machines. Stock the shelves. Clean the bathrooms. Mop the floors. Keep the cooler topped up. Straighten the chip bags. Make sandwiches. Like I said, I’ve worked for this company myself; I know there’s lots of other stuff to do besides jockeying the cash register. Have her do that instead.
Look… if you are on a ship of the US Navy, you kind of expect that the sailor standing next to you can swim, right? This should be a rhetorical question. Because if they can’t swim than maybe they should be working behind a US Navy desk in a US Navy building far onto dry land, right?
Alright, that’s my point then. 7-11 is run by morons.
$1.57
The mummy grabs her can, skipping the brown paper bag that had yet to be offered, and heads off to do whatever it is she does when she’s not buying more beer. The cashier is staring at the pile of coins and has suffered a complete brain-lock. There are three people in line behind me. Now even from where I am standing I can tell that there is an entire second dollar’s worth of change there, but that’s because I can do things like 1st grade math in my head. The lady working the register apparently cannot.
She begins shuffling the coins around as if counting them, but she’s not. She’s just trying to sort them into piles. I pinch the bridge of my nose. She moves a quarter around and whispers “ten.” This is when my admittedly thin sense of patience runs out.
“Five dimes, seven pennies,” I say to her. She apparently doesn’t hear me. So I put my hand under the glass and point to the little piles she is making. I point to the dimes. “Five dimes,” I say, and then to the copper coins, “and seven pennies.” She waves her hands likes she’s trying to swat a bug, then grabs the quarter again and moves it to other side the piles. “Ten” she says when she slides it, and then says “two” when she grabs a dime and finally “three” when she grabs a nickle. Is she counting the number of coins? Is she getting the values wrong? What the fuck is going on in this woman’s head?
“Five dimes,” as I hold up fingers for her to see, “and seven pennies.” She looks back down and now it is clear as I look closer that she has four piles of coins but that dimes and pennies both exist in two of those piles. She doesn’t know the difference between them. They’re almost the same size, so to her, they’re the same coin.
Eventually she gives up because there are now five people in line behind me. She shovels all the change into one giant pile and pushes it off to the side in order to ring me up. I wisely pay with plastic.
At this point I would like to remind the audience of this woman’s job title: CASHIER.
Now before you all go into wokegasms of fury let me make something perfectly clear: As frustrated as I am with her, I am not angry with her, because this is not her fault. I get it. She comes from some miserable, backwards shit-hole where they don’t believe in educating women. She has been deprived of the opportunity to develop these basic life skills by a cruel and unjust world. She is the victim here. Nor should her handicap prevent her from being able to get a job and having a life. I get that, too.
I am angry at 7-11. In their eagerness to hire more tax breaks (that’s not a joke - I worked for that company and while I was there their management openly admitted that’s why they stack their ranks with people who’s last names are 27 letters long) they didn’t bother to do the most basic vetting of abilities. They went through the entire process of interviewing and (I would assume) training this woman to work the buttons of this machine without ever once checking to see if she could do addition and subtraction in her head, or if she could tell a penny from an admittedly filthy looking dime.
And again, it’s not that I think they shouldn’t have denied her a job opportunity. I just strongly believe that they should have given her a different job. Put on her on two person shifts and let her… do… other things. Sweep the parking lot. Refill the ice machines. Stock the shelves. Clean the bathrooms. Mop the floors. Keep the cooler topped up. Straighten the chip bags. Make sandwiches. Like I said, I’ve worked for this company myself; I know there’s lots of other stuff to do besides jockeying the cash register. Have her do that instead.
Look… if you are on a ship of the US Navy, you kind of expect that the sailor standing next to you can swim, right? This should be a rhetorical question. Because if they can’t swim than maybe they should be working behind a US Navy desk in a US Navy building far onto dry land, right?
Alright, that’s my point then. 7-11 is run by morons.