Thanks Boo. Very nice of you to say that. I do like to be appreciated for not swatting the sorely deserving upside the head. But I just can’t believe that saying *nothing * and buying her a piece of office equipment is a “healthy” reaction. I suspect the truly “healthy” would have actually said “your problem now asshole.” Or maybe labelled the wall sorter “FAXES FOR THE OBNOXIOUS BITCH.” Sure, the psychologist would frown those reactions - but only because they weren’t “adaptive”. Healthy and adaptive aren’t always the same thing unfortunately.
The people that shop at my grocery store have raised being an obstructive painintheass to new levels. They never push their cart down one side or the other, they go down the middle and then turn the cart sideways when they want to stop and look at things. They stand around talking in the middle of the aisles. They let their spawn run amok. You name it, they do it.
The other day I was shopping and I turned down the cereal aisle. There was a mother and daughter in the aisle looking at cereal. The mother parked the cart in the left hand side and the daughter stood in the middle and a display in the aisle blocked the far left side. They stood there discussing cereals totally ignoring me. Now I did stop to look at something on the left hand shelves just before the display so I figured they just did not realize I wanted to get through so I aimed my cart toward the middle of the aisle and cleared my throat. They continued to discuss the merits of the various cereals. So I re-aimed my cart again and made a louder throat clearing noise and stared at them. Nothing but cereal. At this point I was debating running the daughter down or saying something like “will one of you bitches get the hell out of my way?” I decided that since discretion is the better part of valor and the Cheerios were at the opposite end of aisle, I’d just back out and go down the next aisle and then pop back into this aisle and grab the Cheerios when I get to the end. I noisily jerked my cart back and the mother finally noticed me and told her daughter to move.
Alas, this was not to be the end of the mother/daughter obstruction team. Two aisles later and there they are again, mom on one side and daughter doing a full body stretch from the middle of the aisle to the other side. This time I said “excuse me!” and started on through, hoping one of them would give me a reason … A couple of aisles later I am in the soda aisle and heading toward the other end when I see the mother/daughter team start down the aisle in blocking formation. This time I said loudly, “NOT AGAIN!” and they veered off out of the aisle.
Another time, near Thanksgiving, there was a very large family of very large people all shopping together. They had to go down every aisle abreast and stand there talking with each other and debating the difference between yams and sweet potatoes and completely ignoring everyone else in the store trying to get their groceries. And they walked as sllllloooooowwwwllly as possible, about 2 steps per minute. My only satisfaction is that they probably missed their Thanksgiving meal because they were still walking around the store blocking the aisles discussing whether to have regular corn or creamed corn.