About a week ago you might have witnessed me skulking around
the local supermarket entrance. I was talking to Spouse on my cell phone while
waiting for a store clerk to return with my eyeglasses from the bottle redemption
center. Why, you ask? Because, honestly, what happened could only happen to me.
I think.
Spouse and I are pretty good about recycling and collecting
bottles for return, though we tend to procrastinate over bringing them to the
recycling center. Fortunately, our local grocery store has it own special
container on the other side of the parking lot for this very purpose. The
redemption program is called Clynk. Isn’t that cute?
You can park your car right next to the facility, scan the
little UPC code on your filled bags and toss the returnables through a door
instead of lugging big, bulky bags into the store. It sounds so easy, and it
is.
For most people.
Spouse had loaded a couple of bags into the trunk of my car
a few days earlier, so I had no excuse for not dropping them off. On my way to
the grocery store I pulled up to the Clynk facility, parked my car and grabbed
the bags of bottles out of my trunk, ignoring the signs suggesting that drivers
turn their engines off.
As I struggled to hold the hatch open and throw the first
bag in, the door slipped and smacked me in the back of my head. The bag was
already in full motion as I flung it through the opening at the same moment
that my eyeglasses – which had been bumped off my face from the force of the
door smack – torpedoed into the container right past the bag of bottles.
I stood there alone in the chilly parking lot rubbing the
rapidly growing bump on the back of my head. Was this karma because I didn’t
turn off my car while recycling, as the sign (which came just short of listing
every species I was saving) had gently suggested?
After tossing the second bag to the side of the other one, I
knew there was only one thing to do. I drove over to the supermarket and
sheepishly approached the customer service counter. How do I explain that my
eyeglasses had a mind of their own and decided to catapult into an eternal pit
of returnables? Somehow I explained what happened and waited for the clerk to
snicker or snort or something.
She didn’t even flinch.
The next thing I know, another store clerk was walking
toward the Clynk container and I was on the phone telling Spouse about this
embarrassing incident. He had more of a reaction than the store clerk, which
made me wonder… how often do they need to retrieve items from the cavernous
bottle vacuum protected by a door that could be used on armored cars? Maybe
this is a common occurrence that should be noted with a warning, right next to
the suggestion to turn your car motor off.
![]() |
Scene of the debacle |
My eyeglasses were returned in just a few minutes and I
finished my shopping without incident, though that bump on my head was a
reminder of what you might deem a low point for a few days.
There has to be a moral to this story, I thought to myself.
Why else would I be attacked by a door, earn a bump on the noggin and lose my
glasses - just because I broke a sort of rule that was really just a
suggestion?
Apparently, the moral of the story is that when Spouse and
the kids don’t provide me with enough material for my column, God provides. And
God definitely has a sense of humor.
No comments:
Post a Comment