Adventures in Self-Checkout vol. 1

So, at work, while being trapped inside with all these freaking people, I spend a lot of my time at the Self Checkouts (SCO.) It's so great--I mean, added with the benefits of having to look busy, I get to watch things like this:

The Smiling Cashier on Register #8: She get dumber every time she pees. It's rough and vulgar, but I swear to God it's true. In one week (ONE WEEK, people) she managed to not know how to put a bag in the wastebasket under her register. It's a standard-issue smallish wastebasket, and the bags were right there--less than 2.5 feet from the thing. Since the closing cashier didn't put one in, she had no clue how to put one in at open, either. I had to explain it to her without rolling my eyes or using the words "fuckwit." Try that when you're not a morning person.

The next day, the Smiling Cashier on Register #8 didn't turn the light on--the light that makes the pretty #8 noticable--for upwards of 50 minutes. Now, I have an excuse as to why I don't turn on the lights: I spend 9 months of my year at either the garden register or the return desk. Neither of my usual haunts at work have pretty lights, so, of course, my brain doesn't think, "turn on the light, dummy." When told to turn on her light (not by me--it ain't my place to tell her such things) she says, and I quote, "Oh, yeah. I was wondering when someone was gonna get that turned on."

She doesn't go up the ladders for downstocking. I get that--the ladders make me feel woozy, so if I had a genuine terror of heights, there's no way I'd go up one. But she doesn't BEND either. Now, on the one hand, it means that nobody ever has to fear seeing her ass crack. But, then, too, that means that anything lower than her elbow is somebody else's problem. I asked her, on the third morning this week, to check the batteries on the endcap, and I'd get them down to get the holes filled. She wrote down 6 item numbers--all six were no lower than her bellybutton. Most of the true holes were lower. She watched me bend over and get that information myself and said, "Yeah, uh, I just did a quick visual on that." It took everything I had to say, "Yeah, uh, it's mostly VISUAL when downstocking, fuckwit." but instead, I said, "Well, I'm bending over."

I'm getting very good at not rolling my eyes and not shrieking in pain from the effort.