I got to thinking about the Chicken Bits incident again over my lunch break, and I figured out just why it bugged me so much.
Because I can imagine exactly what would have happened if it had been my mother and me, when I was 8 or 9 or 10. (That is, assuming my mother would even permit me to eat something we had not paid for yet).
First off: she'd tell me to stop as soon as I started prancing around and waving my arms.
Then, once the rain of chicken pieces had stopped, she would have looked at me, shaken her head a little, and said, "I'm sorry you spilled your food, but I warned you. Now pick them ALL up and put them in the trash. Did the floor get greasy? If it did, we need to find a custodian and let them know."
(An aside: Do parents of this generation still do, "The Look"? You know, The Look? The one that could freeze your blood in its veins? The one that made your stomach turn to ice? Where you KNEW you really screwed up badly even without them saying anything? Both my mom and dad could do The Look, though I think my mom was better at it. (My dad was sometimes too easily amused by the crazy junk my brother and I got up to to be totally stern about it))
And she would have spoken to me on the way home about "This is what happens when you goof around. I asked you not to."
There probably would have been no other punishment, but if we had been in a similar situation again (actually, probably not: that probably would have been the last time she allowed me to carry food around in a store and eat on it), she would have taken whatever-it-was away from me the moment I started prancing around and said sternly, "Remember last time?"
I think that - the fact that the reaction I saw was so different from what I would have expected in my family (and also the fact that my last nerve was stretched pretty thin already) contributed to my sense of "The Pale Horse with a Pale Rider is actually made of chicken nuggets."
At any rate: I should be good on the amount of milk and other food until the weekend, when I can go shopping at a time that is more congenial to me, and less congenial to difficult people.
3 comments:
I find that Friday evening works. Everyone else has "better things to do" and even if people are at the grocery store, they're all in the beer aisle.
H and I were talking about that just the other day, about exactly when did having civilized kids cease. We both see kids at our jobs doing things that would have gotten us in huge trouble if we'd pulled that stuff at that age. Somewhere along the line, a potentially human kid became a precious snowflake, and it all went to hell from there.
Btw, I used to work at WalMars. I don't know who was worse...my coworkers or the rampaging hordes of customers. I know I didn't last long there.
I just find Walmart depressing. Ours is mostly empty, these days; however, I make it a point not to go on the first or the fifteenth of the month, so I don't really know.
There are things (the acetate sleeves I keep my crochet/knitting patterns in, plastic tubs for fabric/yarn storage now that my parents are clearing out their attic, oil for the truck) that are either cheaper or easier to find there, but I usually only go every three to four months.
But when I am there, everyone looks so unhappy . . . and they really don't have much in the store, either; just lots and lots of the same thing.
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