Functionally ReTodded

After a couple of not very sleep filled nights, we decided to violate Do Not Use Warning number one on the side of the Benadryl bottle, which states:

• To make a child sleepy

Yeah? Well fuck you Mr. Diphenhydramine Hydrochloride Antihistamine nazi. You haven’t been here. And don’t boss me from your ivory tower of bulleted items on the packaging either.

So this morning I had to run to the CVS here on the north end of the island. We needed pull-ups for Thing Two, a medicine dosing syringe and Benadryl (or it’generic equivalent). The CVS is about a five minute drive from where we’re staying, it was 9am on a Mondayand all of that means that there was NOBODY at the CVS. NOBODY.

I walked in and confirmed that the store was empty. There was one other customer at the checkout.

So I wandered back, picked up the stuff I came for and when I put my stuff on the counter there at the pharmacy (where I got the syringe thingy) the lady looked at me with the stink eye and said "The register up front is open."

Mmmm. Nice hospitality.

I headed up front where there was one person in line. A woman was standing off to my right looking at Philly Blunts or tacky watches or some shit, and before I realized it she had sidled up to my right. It didn’t feel like she had cut in line, but it was close.

Next thing I know, she actually does the breeze over move and she’s at the fucking register asking the cashier questions about the 96 count Sudafed dosage, costs, etc.

After much debate, she decided on the generic 96-count box (even meth heads have to be cost conscious in today’s economy). I also realized that she was going to have to fill out a passport application worth of personal information in order to buy this stuff. It’s nice to know that we can’t profile people at airports to prevent terrorism, but we can get the state department involved if I get a fucking cold.

Then, after only focusing on the woman who cut in line, I glanced up at the cashier. I am being generous when I say that she was probably "only" eighty years old. And she had glasses so thick that they’d make the guys that built the Hubble telescope envious.

And lucky for me, this wasn’t one of those "they hand you a three ring binder and you fill your shit out" ones. Oh no. This involved the use of a touch screen.

"But FRT, wouldn’t a touch screen make that whole thing faster and easier than the notebook way?"

Yes. You’d think so. But you’d be wrong.

Why?

Because this cashier (whom I think MAY have been Harriett Tubman) is holding the woman’s driver’s license in her left hand at eye level just to the side of the touch screen, she’s got her face less than two inches from the license and screen, and she’s entering the information a character at a time like she’s trying to translate from the Rosetta Stone. Oh, and did I mention that she’s using the classing "Old person using a touch screen LCD that doesn’t believe it’s touch screen, so they poke the fucking thing like they’re trying to put their finger THRU the screen?"

(Rolling a page of paper thru an IBM selectric typewriter from High School would have been faster).

Yes, that’s right. I’m now waiting for this woman as she hammers away, character by character, assaulting the touch screen and convincing me that she’s eventually going to knock that thing off the arm it’s mounted to the counter with, unless I die of old age before that happens.

After twenty minutes (that’s right kids. T-W-E-N-T-Y MINUTES), I throw my hands up and go back to the she-male at the pharmacy counter. She begrudgingly rings up my purchases after chastising me for not having a CVS card, but then spending ten minutes trying to find hers to give me the discount.

I got back to our condo an hour and ten minutes after I left. To drive three miles each way and buy pull-ups, Benadryl and a dispenser took seventy minutes. But if you get to meet the woman that ran The Underground Railroad during the Civil War, then I guess it was worth it.