That Will Be $472.00, please!

I don’t know what made me think of this, but many years ago, I was in the grocery store to buy a couple of sweet potatoes. They couldn’t have been more than $.50 per pound. After all, it was around 1975. But, now that I think of it, that was during the gasoline shortage during the Jimmy Carter years, so maybe they were a little more, but not too much. Anyway, I made my way up to the cash register with my two sweet potatoes. The high school girl cashier rang up the price and calmly told me, “That will be $472.00 please.” I looked at her and said, “What??”. She repeated, “That will be $;472.00.” I said something like, “Well, that just can’t be. It’s only 2 sweet potatoes.”. She was starting to get a little irritated at me, and just kept saying, “It’s $472.00.” And, being a logical person, my mind just kept going “Reject, reject.”

Surely this little high school girl could see how stupid this was. Nobody in their right mind could think that 2 sweet potatoes would cost $472.00. For heavens sake, even if they weighed 10 lbs, each, they would not be $472.00. Once again, I tried to explain that something was wrong, but by now my voice was starting to get that very shrill, higher pitched sound, but had not quite yet reached an official “screech”. This time, the girl said these famous words, “The machine says it’s $472.00, so that’s what it is.”

Now that did it. Here I was dealing with a moron who not only could not see the absurdity of this whole situation even after it is pointed out to her, but she wants me to believe a machine and not my own brain. Well, we all know how that goes. In computer programming terminology that would be GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. My response, spoken in a very low hissing sound that you make when talking between clinched teeth was, “I don’t care what the machine says, it’s wrong. You must have entered something incorrectly, and unless you can get someone up here with half a brain to straighten it out, I am going to make you eat these sweet potatoes.” Well, that’s what I wanted to say, but in reality all I said was, “The machine is wrong. I am not paying $472.00 for 2 sweet potatoes, so you need to get someone up here to figure out the problem.”

Sure enough, she had entered in the code for some exotic hot pepper instead of the code for sweet potatoes. All of this could have been avoided if (1) children are taught to think in school instead of just punch buttons on a “machine”, (2) she had been taught how to add, multiply, and divide the old fashioned way, (3) there were not codes for everything, and (4) along the way, maybe this kid could have been taught manners and a little bit of respect for the customer. Do you think she even apologized? No, I guess she was waiting for the machine to do it for her. If you were wondering, the machine didn’t apologize and I left the store with my blood pressure many points higher than when I went in. And, of course, 35 years later, I am still telling the story.