when two old women go shopping together

Today was another nutso day at work, and Sunny had been away for business last week so had nothing in her fridge. And so we decided to pick up some groceries at lunch. This led one colleague to crack that we were two old women who go out shopping together. I'm not sure how said colleague got from "they both need groceries" to "they are clearly old and lonely," but then he never claimed to have passed the logic section on the LSAT.

At any rate, the store we went to was one that prides itself on its self-serve check-outs. I, painfully self-aware as always, refused to use self-serve as I know I have the patience of a mule worm some animal with no patience. Sunny, ever the technology optimist, went the self check-out route with the reusable, cloth bags she'd brought along. I got through the check-out in two minutes with a few more bags to add to the landfill. When I got to Sunny's side, she was swearing under her breath. Apparently, the self-serve check-out operates on a complicated system of weights and measures and anything other than plastic bags sets it into a tailspin, much like me trying to do the conversion between imperial and metric. She called the woman in charge over to help fix the problem more than once. The woman not only fixed the problem, but also deleted the food item Sunny had scanned just before the problem struck, more than once. Self-serve turned into extremely slow-serve, and not the good kind that means yummy ice cream. Or is that soft-serve?

Forget the patience; today I may have the brains of a mule worm some animal with few brains. Perhaps that's what you get when you're old and decide to go shopping with your equally old friends.

Rainy