Today I was at the grocery store in what I thought was the quickest line of the available checkout lanes. In front of me was a family buying groceries and when it came time to pay they took out their LINK card (Illinois’s welfare system debit card) to pay. It took three attempts at manually entering the card numbers before it went through and, as it turned out, the card did not have enough money on it to cover all of their groceries. When they asked to put a few things back the cashier said that if they took anything off they’d have to start over with entering the card again. The man checking out said he had some cash in the car and ran off to go get it.
In the meantime, the woman behind me is on her cell phone complaining about this and that. From my five minutes in line with her I got the impression that she could easily find something to complain about in any given situation. When it became apparent that the line wasn’t moving at all she asked me if I knew was going on. I told her that they were short on grocery money and needed to get more from the car.
She looked as shocked as if I had told her they were holding up the bank for more cash.
“They don’t have enough MONEY?”, she said. “I can’t believe it. I’m moving to a different line, this is ridiculous, how can they not have enough…”
I cut her off in mid complaint, shrugged my shoulders and said, “Hey. I’m just thankful that I have more than enough money for my groceries today”.
Yeah. That shut her up.
And I do feel thankful. It’s so easy to be in a line like that and just get impatient and annoyed but I decided to take a more zen approach and choose thankfulness.
One of my good friends has a daughter a few months younger than Q and she has reminded me several times that we need to do our best to be the type of women that our daughters will be proud of. I aspire to that every day.
Good on you. Sometimes people at the grocery can be so rude.