Ask Blue Midget: Where Are You?

Dear Blue Midget,

Halffull usually has updates every day, but over the past week there have only been a couple of updates to the site. How come you haven’t put much up?

Sincerely,

A Reader

My Dearest Reader,

I write to you under the direst of circumstances. In this place where I have been trapped, the laws of time and space have no meaning. I am trapped in a state of limbo – a purgatory of sorts, if you will. There is little to sustain me in this place and I feel my mind slipping away, succumbing to the strange sound of bad 80’s music whispering so softly in the back of my mind. It is as if I am waiting in an eternal line-up of poor wretched souls, also trapped in the same damned fate:

I have been stuck in a check-out line at the grocery store since Thursday night.

You see, my friend, this is the era of automation. Every day, customer service dies a little more as corporations cut prices by cutting back labor costs. It began with the self-serve gas stations. We saw it, and it was good. Now, it is rare that we ever go inside of a gas station as we can pump our gas and pay the bill without stepping more than a couple of feet away from the car. As this type of automation becomes more of the social norm, it is being instituted everywhere.

Over a year ago, grocery stores began to implement self-checkout lines so customers could scan in their own items and pay at the station without having to bother interacting with another human. At once I embraced the grocery self-checkout, for when one is in a hurry and has only a couple of items, it will be your friend. Unfortunately, many grocery stores (or Wal-Marts) have restrictions on these particular self-checkout lines. I give you the three major flaws of the grocery store self-checkout stations:

1. People over-estimate their own intelligence in figuring out how to use them

2. Murphy’s other law is that you and twenty other people will have only two items to ring up, but some asshole with a cart full of unscannable shit will get in line ahead of you

3. Rules 1 & 2 will apply every single time you try to use the self-checkout line

On Thursday night I ran to the grocery store to pick up some chocolate chips so that I could walk everyone through a graduated chocolate chip cookie recipe in keeping with the Thanksgiving holiday, but upon getting into the self-checkout line, I was stranded here. That’s why my news post came so late – I had to type it from my cell phone. In fact, yesterday was a voting day in New York State, and I feared that I would not be able to vote, but some merciful soul came by with absentee ballots. A couple of seniors standing in line behind me were so delirious by then that they actually ate the ballots. I am not sure what day it is or even what time it is, just that I’ve been standing next to a rack of magazines for so long that I think my proximity to Britney Spears’ picture on the cover of US Magazine may have given me a raging case of scabies.

Please, send help. I must go now – some woman is trying to fit her ATM card into the machine that spits your receipt out. She must be stopped.