Checkout

How Good Are Old People

So, this is my fifth post in a sitting and I will finish this on a positive.

A few weeks ago, I was at the supermarket with a carer I don’t often have. I’ve had her before but it takes time to build a relationship with a carer so they can know my preferred products and how they manage my busy brain when I just wanna do Social Helen. Also how to navigate my low eyesight and the trolley and all the things.

We were at the checkout and she had unpacked the trolley and then moved around behind me to the outside of the checkout. In front of her was an elderly man and I mean Elderly. I caught sight of him in my good peripheral vision on my right. He had a trolley and was without speaking out loud communicating to someone on my left in my blind spot that they were there and they had a trolley. I turned to my left and saw the equally elderly lady who obviously matched the man on the outside on the checkout. I said to her “You are in my blind spot and I don’t have a husband, but I understood everything he was trying to communicate to you.”

I swear to God! This is what I love about the elderly. She responded with “Be careful what you wish for!” I asked how long they had been married, I think she said, “Sixty years” “You get less for murder!” I told her.

It’s a standard Baby Boomer reply to such circumstances which always sounds wrong but is very amusing.

Life One-Handed

You may have noticed; despite it’s having half the title of my blog. I don’t really write much about living life one-handed. I know, ironic much. It’s because I started to have weaknesses in my late teens so I had started to adapt.

Mum gave me every hot drink to carry to the lounge room and as I’d spill the drink in my left hand, I’d carry one drink at a time. She was very grumpy and impatient as she would carry two cups at the same time.

“Drop your left shoulder!”

Alas, I started adapting. But mostly when she wasn’t watching, I’d carry one at a time. By the time I was 16-17, I was a full-time student, part-time worker at a supermarket, an unpaid babysitter and was building a portfolio to go to college.

I had NO SOCIAL LIFE!

My first job at a supermarket saw me on the left-handed checkout, I wasn’t super-fast. With the right-handed checkouts I was so fast, forty items a minute, that I often had to call the front-end controller, the Prima packs in the trolley and then reconcile it so that on the receipt because the register couldn’t keep up. The trolley looked like a bomb had hit it, but that’s another story for another day.

Ok, times I’d be growled at for not packing the trolley neatly enough. I argued, you can have fast or neat, you can’t have both! Pick one! The end!

I’m also going to seriously kill the carer who insists on doing up the buttons on my men’s pyjama tops because at 1am when I’m naked and trying to quickly get into my pj’s, I cannot work out why it’s not as easy as it should be. It’s because one of my very caring but not so thoughtful, lovely assistants has done the buttons up on my tops.