It was time to return our pop cans and bottles on Saturday. For those of you not familiar with bottle deposit, what happens is this: the consumer pays an extra amount of money per bottle or can whenever they purchase a beverage that comes in one of the said storage containers. After the beverage has been consumed, the can or bottle can be returned to the store to get that extra money back. Here in Michigan, the deposit is ten cents per can. So, if I buy a case of beer, I need to pay $2.40 in addition to the cost of the beer. However, once the beer is consumed, I can return the bottles for the $2.40 I deposited. Got it?
At the grocery store is a machine that is used to automatically count bottles and cans and then give a tally to you so you can take it up to the register and get your cash. Sometimes, as with all objects that store things, it gets full of cans or bottles, and it beeps to let the attendant know that it needs some attention. Well, the room that these machines were in sounded like a beep factory. I was able to find one of the few can machines that was actually operational, and so I proceeded to insert my cans.
Not a few minutes pass when a woman walks in with about twenty bottles. I am using the term "woman" very loosely. She was, as I try to muster up all of my eloquence so as not to seem harsh, a skank. She was not happy that the room was beeping. She asked noone in particular, "Hello? Anybody here?" After nobody answered, she was slighty miffed, so she again asked a question. "Does anybody work in this fucking place?", "Hey, shitheads, get your asses out here!", and "What the fuck is going on???" were some of the finely constructed interrogative statements she used. She went so far as to walking back into the storage area to find some help. Finally, a young guy came around and started taking care of the machines. She asked him if he was in the back "jacking off" but he denied such accusations and informed her that he was making a cardboard bale and safety rules require someone to attend the machine during this process, which is understandable. I don't know if you've ever run a cardboard baler, but someone needs to keep on eye on it when actually making a bale, just to be sure the bale doesn't fall apart or the machine explodes into a thousand deadly pieces.
Some of the woman's cans weren't being accepted by the machines. See, a store can only accept cans that store products it sells. If you buy some crappy no-name soft drink at a two-bit store that has had the pop sitting there for eight years, and the store where you try to take this can back doesn't carry that brand, that store doesn't have to and usually won't take it back. I don't know why I explained this to you, because the cans did come from this store, so that wasn't her problem. The guy running the room gave the woman some bottles in place of the ones that the machines wouldn't accept and told her to run those through the machines so she can get her money. The woman was outraged. She figured that the guy was ripping her off. He was confused. I was confused. The manager that came back to help resolve the situation was confused. The little boy that was returning a few pop bottles was confused. I was waiting for someone to come out of the back room and say "Smile! Your on Candid Camera!" but no such event took place.
She finally got everything figured out, I think. Sometimes I wish I could make people's heads explode at will. That would have been cool.