Life When You Have No Life

Anyone who reads this blog knows that the blogmaster is, to put it whimsically, underemployed... Oh, I do have a few crumbs of work here and there, but as often as not, my days are currently filled with - oh... - not much.

Imagine then, the weekly excitement of Food Section Wednesday - the one day of the week that grocery store fliers arrive in the Washington Post - the day that I get to scan the ads and plan out my shopping excursions for the week!

You see, underemployed people don't do much real shopping - the mall is nothing but a tease when you are watching your pennies. But the grocery store is a whole other deal, because everybody has to eat!

So imagine my joy when I opened the Food section this week and discovered that the Shoppers Food Warehouse in Olney was having a Grand Re-Opening! And to make matters even more exciting, they have cases of Pepsi for 2.99! Do I have some kind of life, or what?!?!?!


So sure enough, I was in the door at Shoppers at around 8:45 this morning for the official grand re-opening, and I immediately noticed there were men in suits crowded around the produce section. I mentioned this to a clerk in the bakery department, and she allowed that the entire company's senior staff was there for the event, including the President of the company!

As I walked through the aisles, I noticed suited managers in almost every aisle, checking to make sure that every can of tomatoes was stacked in razor-sharp lines on the shelves. But mostly, they were standing around doing nothing.

And I thought I didn't have a life!

P.S. When I got home, I noticed they had mis-rung my Pepsi. I got them for $1.99 a case instead! Can life get any better than this?!

Panicking the Populace!

Well, that was fun! I ran up to the Shoppers Food Warehouse in Olney at 6:40 this morning to buy some bottled water, given our latest water main break... and it turns out everyone in zip code 20832 had the same idea... By the time I got there, the water was almost gone... and five minutes later, it WAS gone. The line to check out ran the entire length of the store, and people were already plotting their next move... I heard one unlucky woman who missed out talking on her cel phone, saying "I'm gonna hit Safeway and 7-Eleven... You go to CVS and Giant". The guy in front of me in line said he was going to use his hot tub water to flush his toilets.

I bought three cases of water and a 16 pound bag of ice, despite the fact that WSSC tells us we should have our water back later today. From my experience, it's the good old "Bread, milk and toilet paper" phenomenon that we always see when snow is forecast. You just know we're only going to see flurries, but BY GOD, we're not going to run out of STUFF! And there's always the smug and slightly guilty feeling of triumph when you're leaving the store with a cart full of supplies and you see people just arriving and knowing that they're going to miss out!

I remember back in 1999 when the world was awaiting the Y2K "disaster"... My wife saw on television that people were buying up gallon bottles of water, so she went out a couple of days before the New Year and came home with four jugs of H2O... When I asked her why, she said "because I saw it on TV"! Well, of course, the New Year came and went, and the great Y2K drought miraculously never came to pass, but we kept that water in the basement for another 4 years, until we moved to our new home. Robin wanted to move the water with us, but I refused. So, of course, as soon as I got back from the grocery store this morning, she gave me a finger flick upside the head and said, "SEE! I TOLD you we should have kept that water!"

A lesson to us all, gentlemen... The wife is ALWAYS right - Even when it takes 8 1/2 years to prove her point!