Spinning Roses N' Vines

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.

There was a time when the world was built upon different assumptions. Not better people. Not smarter people. Just different assumptions.

The assumption was that a broken chair would be repaired. That a worn tool would be sharpened. That a machine would be rebuilt rather than discarded. That a man who did not yet know how to do something could learn.

The assumption was that usefulness was not purchased, but made.

Open an old magazine and you can still see it between the pages. Instructions for building a boat in the backyard. Plans for a radio assembled on the kitchen table. Articles explaining how to pour concrete, wire a workshop, repair an engine, build a cabinet, raise a barn.

No one stopped to explain why an ordinary person was capable of these things. It was simply assumed.

The world expected participation.

Somewhere along the way, the assumptions changed.

Now we are surrounded by things we are not meant to open, repair, modify, or understand. We are told to replace rather than mend, to hire rather than learn, to consume rather than create. And because we hear it often enough, many begin to believe that building is the work of specialists, and repair the work of experts.

Yet the old assumptions still linger in certain places.

They live in machine shops where tools older than their owners still earn their keep. They live in workshops where scraps of steel become brackets, where worn bearings are replaced instead of ignored, where old radios glow to life after decades of silence. They live in garages, barns, basements, and sheds. They live in calloused hands and notebooks filled with measurements.

Most of all, they live in the quiet belief that nearly anything can be understood if one is willing to spend enough time with it.

That is the oldest assumption of all.

A broken machine is not a mystery. It is a lesson waiting to be learned.

A missing part is not the end of a project. It is a problem waiting for a solution.

A thing does not lose its value simply because it requires effort. Perhaps that is why old tools, old buildings, and old machines feel different. They come from a world that expected stewardship. They were built by people who assumed someone would care for them after they were gone.

To hold something once meant more than possession. It meant responsibility. It meant maintenance. It meant repair. It meant preserving what was worth preserving and passing it on with a little more life left in it than when it was received.

Those assumptions have become less common, but they have not disappeared. They survive wherever someone looks at a broken thing and says, "Let's see if I can fix it." They survive wherever someone looks at a problem and says, "I can learn." They survive wherever creation is valued more than convenience.

And in those places, the old world has not vanished completely. It is still there, quietly waiting, built upon old assumptions.

Practice Stewardship!