Taking Advantage Of the Elderly

And Them Sometimes Taking Advantage of Everybody Else...


Since I'm hoping to live long enough to be considered "elderly" (but not really expecting to) I'm gonna be careful what I write here today...BUT.

Recently I was ready to pull out what little hair I had left at the grocery store while thrashing my way through the "self checkout" line.

Since the days on our Little Island when I went to Harris Teeter almost every day, I've become proficient at operating the self check terminals and can generally check myself out as quickly as all but the fastest cashiers.

Unless there's a regular check out line where I'm first or at most second I can generally go through the process solo in about the same time unless the attendant is unavailable to approve a beer/wine purchase or I've got 20 kinds of fruits and vegetables with no UPC code or product number and have to look them up.

Any way, yesterday morning about 10:15 AM the local Kroger only had ONE CHECKOUT LINE OPEN--and it had at lest five or six people standing with carts or baskets waiting with disgusted looks on their faces.

As I passed the four self checkout terminals I jumped in on the first one and then realized that with our giant cart full of paper towels and TP and stuff that it would never fit in the bagging area.

Then I noticed that this old geezer with black socks and plaid shorts lovely gayly dressed gentleman had the larger station with the four bag turntable tied up with his little 20 item order.

Any way, I proceeded to curse and fight my way through bagging up $100 worth of groceries and the computer kept objecting because I had to take stuff off the platform and put it in the floor to make more room for more stuff...and the attendant that was supposed to override the computer spent his entire time checking out the old gentleman and another couple of middle aged women with a giant cart fulled with probably twenty or thirty twelve packs of soft drinks.

The old guy might have managed to successfully scan half of his purchase by himself and the women just stood there saying "we're sorry...we don't know how to run these things..."

As I left the store ahead of both the geezer and the soft drink Queens I had to ask myself this...

"Why the heck are so many people so impatient and so selfish as to walk into the "self checkout" with giant purchases and NOT A SINGLE CLUE WHAT THEY ARE DOING rather than just standing in line and waiting at a regular checkout?"

My question actually contains the answer I think.

They're selfish and impatient. And whether they know it or not they hurt people like me that know how to run the system and can never get the attendant's attention the one or two times I need them because instead of waiting their turn the essentially "jump the line" by forcing the attendant to basically manually check them out in the "self check out line."

What kills me is that this happens all the time and the people have the audacity to do it and the stupidity to admit that they don't know what they're doing while they're doing it.

These same people most likely left their car sitting in the fire lane out front or leave their shopping carts sitting beside their parking space rather than taking the time to walk it over to the shopping cart corral.

Any way, we made it home with our provisions and had an excellent afternoon on the deck watching the Turbo Pup wear herself out (see yesterdays postings) and I cooked burgers and roasted corn on the cob and fries and then collapsed on the sofa about 7 PM.

Then this morning since the predicted rain was holding off I decided to tear down one of my front gutter downspouts and see what was clogging things up on that end of the house.

I cleaned the gutters twice already this year and that one end insists on overflowing with anything other than a light rain and that downspout is one of two that the old owner of the house (another elderly gentleman I never met) had had replaced before we bought the house last year. The new downspouts are the newer larger 3" x 5" cross sections and the two older--I presume original ones--are the smaller 2" x 4" size.

What was puzzling was that the entire gutter overflows so easily with the larger downspout when gutter runs only slightly shorter with the smaller spouts didn't have trouble handling the water. It took me about ten minutes climbing the ladder and drilling out pop rivets to discover the trouble.

When the idiot cheating lying contractor replaced the downspouts with the larger sized sections, the thieving moron didn't change out the connection fitting between the main horizontal gutter section with the downspout.

In fact, it's the smallest connection I've ever seen--about 2" in diameter. Doing the math the new gutter is over 5" larger in cross sectional area that the HOLE SUPPLYING WATER TO IT.

I thought my head would explode because our neighbors said that Tommie (the previous owner) had had problems for years and finally paid someone to install the larger downspouts in order to try to reduce the amount of overflow. The moronic contractor apparently came out, spent the time to build up the three elbows and straight sections to the proper length, then saved 15 or 20 minutes per spout and left the stupid small connectors in place--COMPLETELY DEFEATING THE PURPOSE OF THE RENOVATION EXERCISE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

I have very little patience for people that call themselves contractors and go around taking advantage of the elderly and retired people that no longer can do the work for themselves and may be in failing mental capacity.

There's a special place in hell for those folks, and their plumber and HVAC friends are in charge of the Ice Water and Air conditioning...