Check this out

Previously in Hinterspace, I mentioned inheriting my mother's knack for always selecting what turns out to be the slowest checkout line, abetted by idiot customers, clueless cashiers, and/or equipment failures. While this bizarre corollary to Murphy's Law continues to dog me to this day, I've never seen anything to beat this instance of bad checkout line karma, which occurred circa 1976, in down east Maine.

I'm in the local A&P, doing my grocery shopping, and get in the checkout line. It doesn't matter which one, right? Because they're all long and they're all slow: I've miscalculated the timing for my shopping, only realizing after I'm in the store that it's the 3rd of the month – specifically, the day that Social Security checks arrive in the mail (this was 1976, remember?) – and every senior citizen in town has just cashed their check and hit the grocery store (I'm not sure this store could be dignified with the name "supermarket" in that timeframe).

So I've got plenty of time to kill in that checkout line, and by the time I finally inch my way up to the register I've read the front pages and more of every tabloid, women's magazine, and recipe/crossword/horoscope/"how to hold a garage sale" booklet surrounding the candy and gum racks. I unload my cart onto the counter while the senior in front of me pays her tab and counts her change, and then, finally, it's my turn. But wait. There seems to be a slight delay; uh-oh, it must be the obligatory cash register malfunction to cap off this interminable checkout line from hell.

Is the register out of tape? The cash drawer stuck? A number key broken? (We're talking mechanical registers, folks; this is long before electronic whiz-bang features took over. Though it probably wasn't quite as much of an antique as the clipart above might imply.) A power failure, maybe?

The answer is: None of the above. The store management has chosen this moment, in the middle of the busiest day of the month, with lines of customers at every register, to disconnect and remove this cash register where I stand with my unloaded groceries, and install a new one in its place. Granted, the replacement is a newer model. But gee whiz, couldn't it have waited a few hours until after closing? I mean, there's no indication that the old one has stopped working – it worked to check out the endless line of customers ahead of me, including the lady right in front of me.

Eventually they get the new one plugged in and fired up, and manage to actually check my groceries before the ice cream melts into a puddle, and I get out of there and go home. I don't think I ever go back to that A&P again, and when you're as far out in the boonies as this, writing off one of the less-than-a-handful of places to buy groceries isn't to be taken lightly.

Oh, yes, in their haste to get that new cash register rolling, they fail to initialize its calendar (I guess there were certain rudimentary electronic functions even then). If I remember correctly, it's July 3, but the register tape reads something like September 35 in some future year.