Accidental Robot

Sometimes when it comes time to write my weekly post I am at an absolute loss for what to write about. This is one of those times.

Normally I have a bunch of ideas banked that I keep in the back of my mind for such a time as this, but the thing is that I have to be in the right mood to write about certain things. Especially if an idea requires careful attention to make it make sense or, worse yet, if it requires research. I am not in the mood today for careful attention or research. As you may remember from last week’s post, the first week of September always feels like back to school time for me. It then follows that the first weekend after the first week of September is when I have my summer hangover.

I work a regular 9 to 5 (but really it’s 8:30 to 4:30) job, but from Memorial Day to Labor Day we get Fridays off. This makes the four work days of the week a bit longer and a bit more stressful if you’re trying to accomplish a bunch of stuff, but let me tell you it is worth it for three whole days off in a row every single week. This past Friday was the first Friday I’ve worked since May. Happily it was a work from home day and I had only one meeting, so it was quiet and I managed to get a lot of work done. But still, now that it is Sunday morning and I am faced with the reality of getting back to it in 24 short hours, I am really feeling the withdrawal from those Fridays off.

So my brain is kind of switched off at the moment. I don’t want to force it to think anything more than superficial thoughts because tomorrow it is going to have to go back to thinking a lot and doing things and, I will be honest: even though my brain has had the summer to relax a bit, she’s tired. She doesn’t want to go back to work in the morning.

All of which is an explanation for why the following is as dumb as it is.

Last night I went to the grocery store. I don’t like to shop on weekends at all because there are too many humans, but I find Saturday night to generally be an okay time to go to the store. Usually I wait until 7 or 8 o’clock when a lot of people are engaged in their Saturday evening plans and therefore not at the store to bother me. But yesterday I needed some ingredients for dinner, so I had to go a little bit earlier than usual, around 5:30. The store was definitely less crowded than it would have been even a couple of hours earlier, but it was still slightly busier than I would have liked.

I understand that sometimes one gets lost in trying to find a specific item on the shelves. Sometimes you park your cart and have a bit of a wander around an aisle, trying to figure out where they would stock the macadamia nuts if not with all the other nuts in the baking supplies. They could perhaps be with the nuts packaged for snacking, but people use macadamias for snacking and for baking, just like almonds. So if almonds are stocked in both places than why are macadamias not stocked in both places?

But I digress.

The point is that it is easy to lose yourself and stop paying attention to what is around you while grocery shopping. This is understandable. What I do not understand is when there are people walking around the store and not looking where they are going. These are not the folks who are looking at the signs over each aisle trying to find something, no. These are the folks who are in a world of their own, pushing a cart while looking backwards to talk to whomever they are shopping with. The people who walk quickly out of an aisle without looking both ways to see if someone is coming (I shudder to think about how these people cross a street). And, of course, there are always people walking around with their heads down, fully engaged in whatever is happening on their phone.

Yesterday I saw one such individual that really made me question if humans really deserve to be allowed out unsupervised.

The thing about this guy was that he had obviously been injured. Both of his arms were thickly wrapped up in bandages from his palms to above his elbows. It looked like both arms were secured so that they stayed bent at the elbow, so he was walking around kind of like someone doing the robot. Despite the very evident injury, I first encountered this man while I was walking across the front of the store by the registers, headed back to an earlier aisle for something I had forgotten. As I pushed my cart, sticking to the right side of traffic as we do in America, this dude was walking straight down the middle, head down, phone pincered between the fingers of both hands, attempting to text or scroll or something despite the fact that he had minimal use of his hands or wrists. I watched in utter amazement as he just plowed through the store, other customers dodging around him as he was not paying the slightest bit of attention to his surroundings.

My first thought: what a wang, pay attention, you’re in public.

My second thought was actually a series of thoughts which involved imagining exactly how he injured both arms so seriously. All of my imaginings had him doing something equally stupid, like skiing down a massive mountain while also scrolling on his phone and falling flat on his face. Or getting into a car accident because he was being an idiot and driving distracted.

To be clear, I wasn’t wishing these things on this man. But he was already injured, so I felt like my karma could remain in decent balance by imagining how he got an injury that already happened.

The best idea I came up with was that he actually got hurt while walking through the very same store doing the very same thing, only instead of people navigating around him, he came across a couple of kids pushing a very full cart way too fast. They crashed into each other and Busted Arms went flying, landing elbows first on the tile floor, thereby busting up his arms but managing to save his phone from any damage. (In case you are wondering, the kids who crashed into him didn’t notice the accident, nor did their parents who weren’t paying the slightest bit of attention to their children, as often happens in the grocery store.)

However this guy got hurt, even if not through any fault of his own, I could not believe that he was being so careless. He was just wandering around trusting in the goodness of the people around him to not walk into him, knock him down, or run him over. Probably not the best choice in a grocery store where everyone is there on a mission quite literally for their own personal gain.

After I walked past this guy I made another lap around the store, finally coming down the last aisle, the dairy aisle, to make the turn towards the registers again. At the end of the dairy aisle in this particular store is a little whatnot corner. It kind of looks like an overflow space from the pharmacy aisles, but whatever they stock over there must not be very popular because I rarely see people over there. As I made my way towards that section, there was Busted Arms. He was standing in between two of the shelves, still balancing his phone precariously between his fingers, still completely unaware of what was happening around him. But at least this time he was safely ensconced in a low/no traffic area of the store. I wonder if he figured that out for himself and chose to stand there for safety or if he just stopped walking because there was a wall in front of him.

There is no way to know for sure, but I hope for his sake that he learned a little bit from the accident that I made up in my head and decided for himself that he would be better off not wandering around in a crowd. But it was probably the wall.