Kroger

I admit it, I don't always understand social situations. I don't always understand what's going on around me. There's a good chance I'm autistic, but I don't want to self-diagnose. My hearing could be better, too.

This morning I went to Kroger for some groceries. I don't like parking near other cars, and I don't mind doing a little extra walking. So I parked near Little Caesars, which is a few stores down but in the same parking lot.

I went in, got a cart, got my groceries, paid, and took the cart back out to my car. I was almost to my car when the wheels seized up. I thought I'd hit some gum or maybe gotten some string caught in the wheel, but I was a little confused because it seemed like more than one wheel wasn't working. I dragged the cart the rest of the way to the car and started unloading.

A Kroger employee shouted something at me, but he was too far away for me to understand what he was saying. He came running up to me as I unloaded the groceries.

The man was screaming at me. "IT LOCKED BECAUSE YOU TOOK IT OUT OF THE KROGER PARKING LOT!"

I knew that some grocery stores do that, but I didn't know this was one of them. I apologized and kept unloading my groceries. But he just kept on yelling. I don't remember the entire "conversation," but no matter what I said, he screamed back. 

I stayed polite and breezy with my answers. I said things like, "Wow, the new technology is neat." He responded with, "IT'S NOT NEW TECHNOLOGY, WE'VE HAD IT FOR YEARS, EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT!" I'd say, "Well, I didn't know," and he'd come back with, "THERE'S SIGNS EVERYWHERE!"

Note that I've never noticed these signs, and I looked around for them as I was leaving the parking lot and still didn't see any. I'm not saying they aren't there, just that I haven't seen them. My parking space was only two lanes beyond what would be considered in front of Kroger. There was a Kroger cart return less than 50 feet away.

I have no problem with their rules. I have no problem with them enforcing the rules. But this guy was just plain rude. He just wouldn't let it go. We went back and forth for several minutes, and like I said, I was polite the entire time. He wouldn't take apologies, he wouldn't allow me to deescalate the situation, he just kept yelling at me until I finished unpacking and left. I really wanted to call him an asshole as I got in my car, but I didn't.

There were multiple points in the interaction where he could have just said, "Well, now you know," and laughed it off. But no, he just kept on yelling and yelling and yelling. Maybe he'd had a bad day. Maybe he'd had to chase down carts before, from people who were actually stealing them. You know what? I DON'T FUCKING CARE. I have bad days all the time, and I promise you my customers never know the difference.

I am not a violent person, and I'm usually not vindictive, but I want bad things to happen to this man. I got home and filed a complaint online, but I don't feel like it's enough. It happened three hours ago, and I still see him yelling at me whenever I close my eyes. I'm so angry I've given myself a headache. I want this man fired. Out of a cannon. Into a wall.

I will not go back to that location. I can't stand the thought of running into that man again, and I'm worried that if I did, I would do something I'd regret later.

Time Enough At Last

My job is something else right now. And by “something else,” I mean, something besides a job. If you’re not caught up, I’m losing my job at the end of the year because they’re eliminating my position. However, I don’t think they planned it out as well as they could have, because my position technically went away as of the beginning of November. I still have a few duties, but if I took everything I currently do in a day and did it all at once, I’d be done in about an hour.

So yeah, the majority of my day right now is keeping my seat warm. It’s good work if you can get it; too bad it comes with a time limit.

I’m not being lazy – I’m perfectly happy to help out my coworkers. The problem is, almost anything they could teach me at this point would take a few months to learn, and I won’t be there that long. Plus, they just don’t have the time to cross-train me right now. It’s not a good investment of their time to train someone who’s headed out the door.

One of my current duties can’t be started until around 7 PM, but the rest of the office leaves around 4:30. So I’m alone in the building for about three hours every night.

I’m getting a lot of writing done. I have three books that are in the editing/proofreading phase, and I’m moving right along on getting them polished up. I hope I can publish at least one of them before my time runs out, because who knows how much time I’ll have once I find a new job.

Post-Election Blues

You’d think I’d post a big rant right now, but some things go without saying. I ranted plenty back in 2016, and if I were to mouth off now, I’d be covering a lot of well-worn ground. There’s just not much left to say. A while back I even wrote a short story about you-know-who getting elected the first time. It’s called “Think Tank” and you can find it in the collection “Geek Cutes.” My point is, I’m ranted out.

That said, my community is really suffering right now. The Republicans are acting like their favorite basketball team just won a game. For them it’s nice to have a win, but it was just a game - the stakes weren’t really that high. But the people I follow are worried for their lives. Some of them are contemplating suicide, while others are looking into moving to another country.

It’s seriously insane, the difference in the amount of danger involved. If the Republicans had lost, they’d have been angry, but their lives wouldn’t have been upended this way.

That’s the concept I wish people would get – sometimes the stakes are higher for one group than another.

A scenario: If your next door neighbors – people you like even if you don’t always agree with them – were about to be unfairly executed, but you could pay five dollars to set them free, would you? I know it’s not your problem, and I know you were hoping to spend that $5 on a root beer float or something, but are you really willing to let them die?

Because that’s what’s going on here. Republicans are angry that eggs cost more than they used to (something Trump isn’t likely to fix), and they don’t like that their children are learning actual history in school.

Meanwhile, Democrats are angry because women are dying from ectopic pregnancies while doctors wring their hands, worried they’ll go to jail if they help. Democrats are angry because the new anti-trans laws could force people to detransition. And of course Democrats are angry about the usual issues, such as climate change, wealth inequity, police brutality, and the cost of medicine. Very real issues, and much more important than the price of your goddamn eggs.

Yeah, maybe if Kamala had been elected, your groceries would have gone up another $20 a month. But some of your medicines might have gone down by more than $1,000, so… and I say this with a dollop of sarcasm… “it evens out.”

The point is, Republicans lack empathy. I’d say that’s the biggest difference between the two parties. One side wants to make the world a better place for everyone, and the other says “I got mine, screw everyone else.”

Republicans probably think I’m overreacting. And I hope they’re right. Nothing would please me more than to be wrong on this one. I mean that. This is one time when I’d rather say “you were right” than “I told you so.”

But I predict I will be saying “I told you so” a lot in the next four years.

Moving Woes

I’ll be losing my job at the end of the year. Don’t worry about me, I’ve got a pretty decent severance package, and I was looking for an excuse to move to another state anyway. But jeez this whole process is about as stressful as things get. It’s hard to move and change jobs at the same time, especially over such a long distance.

The issue boils down to this:

My realtor can’t show me any more homes until I bring a preapproval letter from a lender. The lenders don’t want to preapprove anything because I won’t have a job then. It doesn’t matter that my severance payments will be the same as my regular paycheck, because it’s not forever.

The order of things is making it difficult. My current house is worth a good deal more than I have left on the mortgage, so I should be making a profit. But I don’t get that until after I sell it, which is after I move, when I could really use that money for the move itself.

I could go ahead and apply for a job up there, but I wouldn’t be able to start until mid-January. So basically I need to get hired for a job I can’t work at yet, just so I can say I have a job.

I could temporarily move into an apartment in the new state, until I get a job. But the problem with that, besides having to move twice, is that we’re unlikely to get one large enough for all our stuff. One of the reasons we’re moving is to get more square feet for all our stuff. It would suck to have to sell half our stuff just so we can move into a temporary apartment. And that’s if we can even find an apartment that allows three cats.

And yeah, we can rent a storage unit for some of our stuff, but that’s just more money on top of everything else.

I can’t be the first person to move to a new state between jobs. Seriously, how do people do this?

Anyway, the usual self-promotion: If you're reading this and want to help, buy my books or buy me a coffee.

Dream: The Bed

I dreamed I saw a movie that was a bit like Misery with touches of Gerald’s Game. The main character spent most of the story tied to a bed. His kidnapper was a woman, and she spent the movie taking care of him, feeding him, and so on. The woman was really bubbly and doting, and talked to him as if he was there by choice. (Despite the theme, it was not a sex dream.)

The woman kept him docile by drugging him, and the drugs gave him hallucinations. He kept seeing the woman as different women he’d known throughout his life. Different actresses played the woman every few minutes, but they all had the same mannerisms and crazed personality, since their appearance was just a hallucination.

The man believed that he was being punished for something, so the movie kept showing flashbacks, memories of women he'd wronged. Each time the woman had a new face, he'd remember the worst thing he'd ever done to that woman.

In the end, the hallucinations wore off, and he saw the woman for who she really was. She was a stranger to him. He'd seen her a couple of times in a crowd, but he'd never interacted with her. The woman, however, was obsessed with him, and had been stalking him for a while.

He did manage to escape in the end.

Things That Only Happen To Old People

This morning my wife had a doctor’s appointment downtown. I set my alarm with the intention of leaving an hour before the appointment. When I got up, I checked Google Maps on my phone, and it said it would take an hour and a half to get to the doctor. Figuring traffic was unusually bad, we left an additional half hour early.

We noticed pretty quickly that traffic wasn’t particularly bad. For every ten minutes we drove, we got twenty minutes closer according to the app. When we were about halfway there, the app started having us turn onto back roads. Some of these weren’t even roads, but more like alleys and parking lots. The app showed our route as a stairstep pattern, going from alley to alley to get to our destination. At one point it had us go through a road with a “No Access” sign.

Eventually we realized that this couldn’t possibly be right, so we stopped so I could figure out the problem. It turned out the app was set to “bicycle” instead of “car.” I don’t know how that happened, I’ve never used the bicycle setting, I don’t even own a bike. My finger must have brushed it or something.

Anyway, long story short, we got to the doctor 45 minutes early.

Dreams: Robocop 4

I dreamed they had just released Robocop 4 in the theaters. (Is there already a Robocop 4? I have no idea.) R4 had a different tone than the rest of the series. His partner this time was played by Sarah Michelle Gellar (my wife and I are currently rewatching Buffy), and it had a comedic "buddy cop" feel like the Lethal Weapon movies.

However, Dan O'Herlihy, who played the CEO in the original Robocop, was angry that he hadn't been cast in R4. (Note, in real life, this actor died in 2005.) O'Herlihy started killing off the rest of the cast.

I was Gellar in the dream, though I was probably closer to Buffy, and I was investigating the murders. I explored a movie theater where Robocop 4 was playing. The theater complex had a river running through it, and customers had to take gondolas to reach the different theaters. 

O'Herlihy, which is difficult to type, fled the scene of the crime in a gondola. He had the rest of the board members from Robocop in a gondola with him. I tried to follow by walking in the waist-deep water, but then he poured something in the water that made it acidic. So I had to climb up to a short ledge that lined the flooded hallways.

I still managed to keep up for a while, but there were gaps in the ledge which slowed me down. Then one of the board members (played by Ralph Bellamy in the dream, though he wasn't in Robocop IRL) betrayed O'Herlihy and somehow helped me get a boat of my own. The details get a little blurry at that point, but Bellamy and I did manage to capture O'Herlihy and bring him to justice.