This afternoon I met a friend at the fruit and vegetable store to shop. So it isn’t the most exciting thing you can think of. But she’s been telling me she’s never gone to this store and would like to go… blah blah… so I invited her along because I needed to pick some stuff up.
We got there a little after two and had to wait with a growing crowd in the parking lot for the place to reopen after lunch at 2:30. By the number of people outside when they finally opened the doors, they need to eat faster.
Turns out, everyone waiting with us in the lot shopped at the same pace (it isn’t that big a store… after all it’s mainly fruits and veggies) and we all got in line to check out at the same time. Given that this phenomenon likely happens every day at the same time, you’d expect them to have every cash register open. No way. Maybe half. Maybe. So we stood there in line waiting for all the extremely slow old people ahead of us to check out. As we were creeping toward the front, an old lady who had been in front of us came up next to us, waved two bags of rabbit-food lettuce in front of us and said something. I thought she’d paid for it and wanted to leave. (Once I was at this store and they were having a 2 for 1 sale on pineapples and the cashier MADE me go get a second pineapple which, you guessed it, we didn’t end up eating. So I figured she had been ordered to retrieve an abundance of rabbit food.) We let her ahead of us. Turns out, she just wanted to get ahead of us because she’d forgotten the rabbit food and since she’d already checked out she felt entitled to jump to the head of the line. I was annoyed. So I turned to my friend and said in French that it isn’t fair and that if I forget something which I do a lot I then just wait. My friend was completely confused, had no idea what I was saying (I really didn’t, either) and was tyring to figure out what was going on… when the old lady turned to me and started telling me how it was totally ok to cut in line in her situation. My vocabulary can’t quite keep up with an old lady, so I just kept repeating that I’d wait. Finally the man in front of her let her ahead of him, I think because he was tired of listening to us. She got her way so she didn’t care. I felt better because at least I’d spoken my mind, sort of, rather than just get walked on. Ok, so she still jumped to the head of the line. But at least she knew I thought it sucked.
In the movie “Traitor” one multi-lingual character asks in what language another multi-lingual character dreams. You must be really fitting in, since now you are complaining about them in french. The dreaming will be next.