Am I Whining?
And don't even get me started on the blue laws.
A while back I lived in North Carolina, and some friends of mine,I'll call them Griff and Presto, lived on the water in a fabulous place that we called "The Big House." One summer we decided to take advantage of their locale by hosting a weekly affair on Sunday mornings: The Big House Brunch.
On my way over to the second or third of these, I called ahead to Griff to see if I should pick anything up. He said that they were pretty much set, except if I wanted I could pick up some champagne so he could make Mimosas -- champagne and orange juice. Oh, and could I also get some orange juice.
I stopped at Winn Dixie, and within minutes my red hand basket (I don't own one...they had a stack of them at the door) was filled with champagne, orange juice, and some other breakfast stuff like donuts and muffins that I wouldn't have gotten for myself, but which seemed like a good idea for the Big House Brunch.
Sunday mornings are slow at Winn Dixie, even by North Carolina standards, so I walked right up to the register with my basket. Well really, as I said, it was their basket. As she passed my items over the scanner, the cashier set aside my champagne and casually remarked that she couldn't sell it to me. Expecting a joke about legal age or something, I smiled and asked why not. She said: "It's not noon yet."
You see, North Carolina has these "blue laws" about where and when you can buy alcohol. I checked my watch, and it said 11:58. No problem. I told her to just go ahead and ring everything else up, and I would stand there and wait (her machine literally would not scan alcohol until noon.) There was nobody behind me, so this seemed like a reasonable solution.
Then she said: "But that's 10 minutes!"
"No, it's only two minutes. It's 11:58." I showed her my watch.
She tapped her computer screen. "It's 11:50."
Now, I must tell you that at the time, I had a job that required me to keep accurate time. Just days earlier I had set my watch, as was the practice among my colleagues, according to the atomic clock at the US Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, you cannot throw around casual mention of atomic clocks and observatories without sounding like a huge geek, so I looked around for some other clock or watch to corroborate my version of the correct time. Just then the manager, walking by and perhaps sensing the conflict taking place, tapped his watch and said loudly: "Ten minutes, ladies."
Unbelievable! I looked past him at the only other source of time in sight: the clock on the wall above the deli counter. 11:50. Every single clock in this whole stinking place was off. Now you might assume, and I can't blame you, that the store was right, and that I was in fact wrong. But let me say that later, I checked my time against several other highly reliable sources, and it was indeed correct.
We had orange juice instead of mimosa that day.
What gets me is not that the cashier had the incorrect time, or even that the cashier AND the manager had the incorrect time. What really boiled me was that these people, who had time constraints so important to them that they programmed their computers to reject certain products before noon; who probably had alarms that automatically armed at certain times; who probably had customers waiting at their doors in the mornings waiting to get in immediately after opening time; these people couldn't even find an accurate source of time to calibrate the running of all these things and others. They probably set the clock on their computer according to the wristwatch on the arm of whatever deputy-assistant manager happened to be standing there when they booted the thing up. They then used that as the ultimate reference from then on.
And don't even get me started on the blue laws.
On my way over to the second or third of these, I called ahead to Griff to see if I should pick anything up. He said that they were pretty much set, except if I wanted I could pick up some champagne so he could make Mimosas -- champagne and orange juice. Oh, and could I also get some orange juice.
I stopped at Winn Dixie, and within minutes my red hand basket (I don't own one...they had a stack of them at the door) was filled with champagne, orange juice, and some other breakfast stuff like donuts and muffins that I wouldn't have gotten for myself, but which seemed like a good idea for the Big House Brunch.
Sunday mornings are slow at Winn Dixie, even by North Carolina standards, so I walked right up to the register with my basket. Well really, as I said, it was their basket. As she passed my items over the scanner, the cashier set aside my champagne and casually remarked that she couldn't sell it to me. Expecting a joke about legal age or something, I smiled and asked why not. She said: "It's not noon yet."
You see, North Carolina has these "blue laws" about where and when you can buy alcohol. I checked my watch, and it said 11:58. No problem. I told her to just go ahead and ring everything else up, and I would stand there and wait (her machine literally would not scan alcohol until noon.) There was nobody behind me, so this seemed like a reasonable solution.
Then she said: "But that's 10 minutes!"
"No, it's only two minutes. It's 11:58." I showed her my watch.
She tapped her computer screen. "It's 11:50."
Now, I must tell you that at the time, I had a job that required me to keep accurate time. Just days earlier I had set my watch, as was the practice among my colleagues, according to the atomic clock at the US Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, you cannot throw around casual mention of atomic clocks and observatories without sounding like a huge geek, so I looked around for some other clock or watch to corroborate my version of the correct time. Just then the manager, walking by and perhaps sensing the conflict taking place, tapped his watch and said loudly: "Ten minutes, ladies."
Unbelievable! I looked past him at the only other source of time in sight: the clock on the wall above the deli counter. 11:50. Every single clock in this whole stinking place was off. Now you might assume, and I can't blame you, that the store was right, and that I was in fact wrong. But let me say that later, I checked my time against several other highly reliable sources, and it was indeed correct.
We had orange juice instead of mimosa that day.
What gets me is not that the cashier had the incorrect time, or even that the cashier AND the manager had the incorrect time. What really boiled me was that these people, who had time constraints so important to them that they programmed their computers to reject certain products before noon; who probably had alarms that automatically armed at certain times; who probably had customers waiting at their doors in the mornings waiting to get in immediately after opening time; these people couldn't even find an accurate source of time to calibrate the running of all these things and others. They probably set the clock on their computer according to the wristwatch on the arm of whatever deputy-assistant manager happened to be standing there when they booted the thing up. They then used that as the ultimate reference from then on.
And don't even get me started on the blue laws.