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.

On the one hand, people often get "tired" of someone having an ongoing disability. To paraphrase another post, "Your friends will take you to the ER the first time you shit blood, but the 20th time, that's TMI." Plenty of people with ongoing conditions have experienced the people around them eventually running out of sympathy, eventually expecting them to "get over it" and be abled, even if that's never going to happen. These onlookers can't comprehend chronic disabilities, or illnesses that don't just go away eventually. They believe in the power of Proper Treatment™ even if there isn't any such treatment for what you have.

On the other hand, people also seem incapable of understanding that you can be temporarily disabled, or that treatments can help you become less disabled. Look at how people accuse people with DID of "faking" if they're not miserable, or if they've learned to manage/accommodate/decrease their symptoms. To them, it doesn't matter if you've been in therapy for years, known for decades, or anything – apparently, knowing anything about how to deal with your disorder means you don't actually have it. Or, if you have a situation like "I was hearing impaired before, but the source of my impairment was curable, so I'm not now.", people seem to take that as evidence that your hearing impairment wasn't that bad or never actually mattered.

remember when feminism was about uplifting girls and teaching them that they could achieve anything they set their heart to, that they weren't inherently weaker than the boys just because they were girls. man i fucking miss those days, but what a lovely change to see from BIS. i really hope they don't fold to the idea of there "needing" to be even more segregated divisions, and here's to hoping that we will see their commitment to "making ice skating inclusive and accessible for all" be extended to trans skaters with time, too. 🙏

& here's their statement from insta, if you're curious:

Arromantic Icon

I love not farming

I respect the hell out of farmers and I'm glad that's someone's dream. because it's sure not mine

I would not be taken in by the tradwife influencer grift about milking a cow in a sundress. I have been around cows. my uncle was a dairy farmer. I love not milking a cow. I love getting milk from a store. I love getting vegetables and fruit and meat and bread from a store.

would I rather it be a local farm's store or a local bakery or butcher shop? yes! maybe when I make more money!