The Produce Department

Working at a grocery store was so much more work than I thought it would be. And people can be a real pain. I thought that I would get to use my knowledge of the benefits of different fruits and vegetables. I could picture myself helping people pick out the foods that were good for them, and warning them of the stuff that was bad. " No Mrs. Treadway (I would get to know their names because they appreciated my head full of knowledge and my gentle way of guiding them to the better foods),you don't really need to be eating all that corn. Let's just put that back and find something more healthy. You know that corn is nothing but a starch. You could just eat a spoon of sugar and it would be the same. You need leafy greens. They are full of antioxidants. And these carrots will help your eyes."
That didn't happen though. Instead, I had an old diabetic Jewish lady come in and boss me around and talk down to me as I cut her sample after sample of mangoes so that she could pick the right one. After running back and forth from the kitchen to the pile of mangoes, she decided that she didn't want one after all. What she really wanted to do was to eat a plum that she plucked out of the center of the neatly stacked rows that I had just finished working on. Keeping me busy, cutting her mango samples gave her the opportunity to sample all kinds of fruit while throwing the pits and seeds back onto the beautiful rows that I had worked so hard on. "Somebody needs to clean up this mess," she shouted as she rolled her buggy out of my department and towards the bakery. When I went to see what she was talking about I stepped on a plum. Pulling the plum from the center, she had set the other ones free. They were free to roll down the rows and onto the floor where peoples' buggies smashed them into a mush. I had just cleaned the vinyl floor, and it was spotless. She did not even say thank you to me. I silently promised to myself that the next time I saw her in my department I would run and get a bunch of boxes of Maxi Pads and laxatives and hide them in the bottom of her buggy. But that wasn't enough. I would slide six ears of corn in there too.