A smart checkout guy

On Saturday my colleagues and I decided to check out a restaurant I've been meaning to visit for almost two months now. (I'll be writing about the restaurant shortly.) We arrived a little early so to kill time we walked into a big grocery store nearby. This one called itself a "hyperstore" and stocked itself with a lot of slightly exotic goods that you normally don't get in the other stores. Stuff like foreign toiletries, snacks, some jewelery etc. I was thrilled because I found some stuff that I had given up hope of ever finding in India. We even ran into our sweet HR lady who was shopping with her kid and husband.

After picking up what we wanted from the shelves, we walked to the checkout counter. There were two and since someone had a big shopping cart at one, I stood at the other, with my two items. My colleague who had six items stood behind me. The checkout guy was scanning and bagging my items when this random guy showed up with a candy bar and a soda bottle, slid between me and my colleague and thrust his stuff into the checkout out guy's face and said, "Scan these two.". This is the kind of behavior that sends me into a white-hot rage. Normally, if you have a small number of items and someone in front had a much bigger number, it's acceptable to ask if you can move ahead, but you still have to ask. You can't just cut in without permission and particularly not if the other person has about the same number of items as you. If I was standing behind, I'd have politely asked him to move to the back but since I was ahead, I didn't have a reason to reprimand him.

The checkout guy finished my stuff, bagged it. I paid for the items and just stood there, waiting to watch what would happen. If he started processing the other guy's stuff, I would have interefered. But the smart dude calmly ignored the other guy's stuff, instead took my colleague's items and started bagging them! The look on the other guy's face was priceless. Funnily enough, even my colleague wasn't too concerned with all of this. The other guy started shooting daggers at all of us and I just stood there in case a situation developed. (The readers familiar with another incident that wasn't reported on the blog are probably slapping their heads right now!) Like I said, nothing much happened, he just kept staring at us even as we got our bags and left. Crisis averted purely by the quick thinking of the checkout guy. I really wanted to shake his hand and say, "Job well done." but I didn't want to antagonize the a-hole who cut in, so we just kept walking.