A Glimpse into the Future

I had a brief glimpse into my future today.

It wasn't pretty.

I was grocery shopping, at Maxi. The "welfare" Maxi, as a friend of mine calls it, where all the produce looks like it's first fallen off the back of the delivery truck, and half the customers are worse-dressed than I am.

Which is, sadly, saying something! Never one to look in a mirror before leaving the house, I am often appalled by my reflection should I happen upon it by chance when I'm out and about in the world. To those who wonder, upon seeing me in all my "glory," "What was she thinking?" the answer is simply, I wasn't. I never think about what I look like, unless I'm dressing up for a special occasion. So, when I go grocery shopping at the welfare Maxi, sadly, I fit right in.

And I didn't have the token you need to get a shopping cart. Or a loonie, either. I did manage to trade in four quarters and get a dollar so I could release a shopping cart from its chains at last and begin my brief course round the store.

Fast-forward to me putting away my groceries in the trunk of the car and returning the cart. Or rather, trying to. Because a few idiots had been there before me.

One idiot had jammed a small cart so awkwardly into a large cart - in order to get his or her token back from the locking mechanism - that it was impossible to wrench it out straight again, and nobody could use that lane for returning their carts.

Another idiot had managed to turn his/her cart 180 degrees and lock it up that way, retrieving their token but preventing anyone else from using that lane.

Several other people had just given up, and carts were abandoned willy-nilly.

Now this sort of thing makes my blood boil. I started wiggling first one cart and then another in an attempt the fix the problems. Soon I was joined by a rather tall young man who seemed to know quite a trick involving inserting and retrieving a token to free up the various carts, and in a few minutes we had organized the carts properly, leaving several of them unlocked for lucky patrons to find in the future.

I was happy to return my cart and get my dollar back though! But as I walked triumphantly back to the car, I had a premonition...

Greenfield Park Granny Teaches Lazy Patrons Lesson

The elderly lady who has been seen re-organizing shopping carts at local grocery stores appeared again last night at the Greenfield Park shopping Mall. Witnesses say she swung her umbrella at a man, believed to be in his 30s, who failed to put his shopping cart away properly in the parking lot at the Maxi store there. Moving unexpectedly swiftly for a woman of her apparent age, she managed to land some blows on the man's shoulders and buttocks, before he reached the safety of his car and called police. Passers-by convinced "Granny," as she has affectionately become known, that she should leave quietly, and when the cops got there both she and the man she had assaulted were gone. One of the remaining witnesses said "If people would just put the carts away properly, nobody would be inconvenienced and nobody would be upset! but there's always somebody who thinks they are so much better than anybody else...I think Granny might be a bit off her rocker, but she wouldn't be if people just did what they were supposed to in the first place!"