Free Association

After nearly twenty minutes on line, I finally reached the front of the brightly lit store where I stood waiting for an open register. A screen read Register Eight was now open. I saw a young clerk ten feet away and he waved me over. I took one step toward him and this lady darted her cart in front of me from behind, blocking me, and she looked at me and said “Oh, he’s my friend. I need to talk to him about something. Mind if I go ahead of you?”

Now I will admit, I was so stunned I froze up completely. She had caught me with my guard down. Really snuck me. She repeated herself as she overtook me from the inside lane and looked at me with pity like I was a toddler who just didn’t quite get it. The best I could muster was a meek little “What? Your friend?” She mumbled something about her son, and her man and her were now in front of me pushing a cart full of things and I was standing behind them with one white shirt in my hand. How did I lose pole position here?

Goodness. I had to regroup. Recalibrate. Now I saw past them. And the clerk had a very dramatic perplexed look on his face. So I said quite loudly (but very calmly, think James Earl Jones) from ten feet away “Hey dude, I am the next customer here. But this lady [pointing at perp’s back] says she is your friend and that she needs to talk to you about something. Do you know her?” The clerk looked from me to right into her eyes, and he looked back over at me and YELLED “HELL NO, I DON’T KNOW HER!” And he told them to get back in line and waved me over!!! It was surreal. Truly a magical moment, the only way I can describe it is I felt a wave of gratitude come over me like how people sometimes describe the birth of their first child. This was that big, at least.

I walked up and put my shirt on the counter and told the clerk “Hey, anybody ever pretend to be your friend because you work at Marshall’s before?” Guy is laughing hard now. He is slapping the counter and everything, and the couple is right there ten feet away. I thought he would want to change the topic of conversation but he proceeds to comment more on the fraudulent friendship.

Loving that he seems to want to roast the line-cutters, I remind him that she had also hastily thrown in that she knew him through her son to which we both started giggling now. He is fanning the flames. “Damn! She cooked up a whole backstory for her son too!” Finally, I said bye. The woman walked up to the clerk again and so I had to throw in a “I’ll let you two buds catch up!” He laughed right in her face and said “How are you going to make up a story like that to get in front of a guy buying one thing?”

She said “I know you.”

Damn.

He kept saying he didn’t know her. She wouldn’t budge. She didn’t know where she knew him from, but she knew him.

The sociopaths of today are a brazen and dangerous lot. We see it each day. That’s why I want to commend the clerk at Register Eight for stepping up and shutting that nonsense down hard. I will never forget the day somebody finally looked a line-cutter up and down and proceeded to roast them in front of the whole store.

Justice. All you line-cutters run and tell all your little line-cutting friends that order has been restored.