Everytime I go to the grocery store, I lose my sh--. And it doesn't seem to matter when I go now that I live out in the Grove; there is always some a-hole between me and my goal.
You might be thinking, "Oh, come on, it can't be that bad." All I can say to you is false. It is that bad.
In the first place, I now live in the outer ring suburbs. Some people at work like to argue with me and claim that it is a "bedroom community," not an "outer ring suburb." All I can say to those people is WHATEVER YOU WANT TO CALL IT. If I drive about a half a mile in any direction but north, I end up in a corn field. I call that the outer rings. If a place can be both things, it probably is, because as far as I can tell, everybody leaves at the same time, everybody comes home at the same time, and everybody goes to the freaking grocery store at the same time.
More than once, I have gone after work, and there are no baskets left. The lines are backed up into the meat department. Children are screaming as loudly as they possibly can while parents worship them in the aisles. People budge in line and act like they don't see you even though they do, then blush when you talk loudly about how people are more polite in the hood (which they are).
So, today, I said to myself, "F this sh--. I'm going to go at 8:30." In my head, I thought that this would vastly improve matters. And at first, I was right. There were far fewer people, and even though I did run into a coworker (because now I live in a small town), it was much better. And then I got to the baking aisle.
In the baking aisle, I local popular grocery chain employee (of the baby bear variety) was stocking shelves. In the city, this was no big deal. The guy (and it was always the same guy) always got out of the way when you were trying to get something off the shelf and even went away for awhile so you could make your purchase. Not this guy. This guy moved in front of me everywhere I went. He even at once point said, "Excuse me" in a snotty voice. I had like 8 things to get in the baking aisle, and the guy was in front of 4 of them. At one point, I kid you not, I grabbed powdered sugar and he was inches away from me when I turned around. Eventually I gave him a dirty look and moved on. As a former store employee, I know that employees are supposed to get out of the way so that people can buy stuff. And here I was being treated the way they treat you at 2 AM in the city. At 2 AM, I expect stock people to give me dirty looks, but at 8:30, they better just move along.
In any case, I moved onward in my quest to buy food. And they were out of like everything. Why the guy was stocking the baking aisle, I don't know. In addition, they don't carry half the things I want because the store is, quite frankly, half the size of a normal store.
Finally I finish and what happens? Baking Aisle man comes with a forklift to the place where I am in the bread aisle, which faces the check-outs. Now, nobody can get by him, lines are backing up, and he is lifting down stock from the top of the bread aisle shelves. I need ot go back to my former store, but I don't believe extra crap was stored above the bread aisle, and certainly not near the check-outs. So by this time, I am irrate. And I don't say anything, and I finally get checked out, but by the time I go to my car, I am just livid about my grocery store trip, which took over an hour, solely because I couldn't find stuff and I couldn't get to the stuff I wanted. The store is poorly organized and small, and the staff is rude.
I used to just lose my sh-- because I was crabby, but now, there's like even more reason to just lose it.
That's installment #1 from the Outer Rings. There are other nice, fun things that are happening, but that's one that just bugs me.