Isn’t it funny how the most simple and seemingly harmless things can throw us off?

     Even people being helpful.

     Especially people being helpful on their own terms without regard to what you actually want done.

     I went to my local Rainbow Foods today to get groceries.  It should be so simple.  I brought my nice canvas bag with me, as I often do.  Most of the time, I can’t get all my groceries into it, but it certainly reduces the amount of plastic and paper wasted by our household.  Yes, we recycle, but as we all know, not everything that you put in your recycle bin actually ends up being recycled.  Best to rely most heavily on the reduce/reuse tactic, and save recycling for the unavoidable stuff.

     Anyway, I get up to the check-out counter, and find that they now have baggers.

     If you’ve ever been to the grocery store with me, you know that I’m a little particular about how my groceries are bagged.  I put all the frozen stuff together in one bag, the refrigerated stuff in another, and the stuff that goes in various cabinets gets grouped together. 

     Heavy, durable or well-packaged stuff on the bottom, fragile, crushable, or smooshable stuff on top.  Tall, square items to the outside, small, disorderly items to the inside.  Fill each bag completely, and then move on.

     I’ll admit, it’s more than a little pathological.  I arrange things in the cart so that it is easy to unload the cart onto the conveyer in such a way as to make it easy to pack the bags…which makes it easier and more efficient to put stuff away when I get home.

     It’s not rocket science, but yes, it IS a tad obsessive.  On the other hand, it saves me time for doing things like writing blog entries complaining about how people goof up my system and waste my time.

     But I digress…

     When I realized that the guy at the end of the counter was supposed to bag my groceries, I handed him the canvas bag.  He looked at me like I’d just hit him with a rubber fish, and then explained that I did so because he wasn’t wearing his moonbeam coat.

     “What’s this?”  He asked with a truly remarkable blend of confusion and contempt that tapered away into a smooth finish that hinted vaguely of ennui.

     “It’s a canvas bag.  If you can’t get everything into it, please put the rest in paper bags.” (You know, because trees are a much more renewable resource than oil.)

     “Hmmmph” he agreed.

     There was a manager standing down there with him.  I assumed she was supervising his efforts.

     I paid, and then stood and waited while he carefully placed two or three items in each plastic bag, and then placed the bags in my cart.  I would have reminded him that I asked for paper, but I needed to get home and get ready for the kids to come home from school, and didn’t have another twenty minutes to wait.

  Once outside the store, I went through and re-packed my bags…including the contents of the plastic bag that had been placed inside of my canvas bag.  I condensed the five or so bags into three and got the really fragile and smooshable stuff out from under the heavier stuff, and drove home, wondering if maybe I should start shopping at Cub.  Either that, or I need to get used to eating smooshed bread.

     Or maybe I could get some therapy and get over the ingrained illness that is “Minnesota Nice”, and just tell the baggers to back off…I’ll do it myself.

     Yeah…that sounds like a lot more fun.