Vision Navigator

What’s up with the above picture you say? Well, I’ll tell you…

It all started when my wife asked me, “Oh honey, can you just run real quick to the grocery store? All we need are hot dogs and ice.”

Seemed simple enough.

So, being the self-sacrificing husband that I am, I said, “Sure.”

So naive. So trusting. So gullible.

Little did I know that “real quick” would actually translate into well over an hour — but not just any hour. You know how time slows down when you’re in an accident? How it can make mere seconds feel like an eternity as every detail becomes etched in your memory? That’s what this hour was like — a twilight zone of sorts. A place where hope begins to fade away, ice begins to melt, and patience is tried in a merciless crucible of helpless waiting that I now fondly refer to as “Grocery Store Hell.”

Ok, it wasn’t really all that bad, but just thought I’d just add to the dramatic tension a bit.

I found the hot dogs (Oscar Mayer natural beef nitrite free franks — gotta be healthy, you know) and ice quickly enough. Then decided to do the self-checkout option, to save even more time. Scanned my items without a hitch, but since I was writing a check, I had to give the attendant my driver’s license. She took it and my check back to her register/kiosk thingy, and…

That’s when it happened.

It took me a minute or two to notice something was wrong. The attendant looked flustered. She mumbled something about this being her first day. When I asked if there was a problem, she turned to me with a look of desperation, and said, “Your driver’s license is stuck in the cash register.”

“Huh?” I responded intelligently. Rebounding, I decided to take a look for myself. I figured that maybe I could just pry it out, given that I have the strength of ten men, no doubt.

The problem was that it was nowhere in sight. It had fallen into a crack just behind the stainless steel lockbox portion of the register — and there was no apparent way to access it. Eventually a manager came by. “You probably have this happen all the time?” I wondered out loud, hopefully.

“No, ” he replied, avoiding eye contact. “I don’t think this has ever happened before.”

50 minutes, 2 managers, several tools, and numerous angry backed up in line shoppers later, my driver’s license was freed.

About 10 minutes into this ordeal, it dawned on me that maybe God wanted to teach me something. Maybe I’m not the most patient person in the world (and isn’t patience fruit of the Spirit no. 4?). Maybe it’s good to realize once in awhile how little control I really have over my own life, and how infrequently I thank God for how well most things in my life usually go. Maybe I should think about how the poor attendant felt. After all, it was just an accident. A freakish one at that. Yet she could barely look me in the eyes. And her managers didn’t seem to be thinking warm fuzzy thoughts about her. And neither did the customers who were being slowed up in line. And now she had to deal with them while keeping one eye on the cashbox that was left sitting out on the floor in the open.

So…I began to look on the bright side. Since I’m a blogging freak now, I decided to take a picture of the poor managers as they struggled to recover my driver’s license. This made me laugh (to myself, discretely, and not at them, but with them of course). I also thought that lightening the mood a bit might be beneficial for everyone involved. So, I helpfully offered to watch the cash box, and take a little something off the top as commission Seriously, I did make a point to reassure the poor attendant that I didn’t want to kill her, I knew this was all an accident, and that if anyone was to blame, it was the designer of the register, not her.

As I left, I thanked them all for their efforts, and told the attendant that things couldn’t get much worse than that, so it should be all downhill from here. And to have a nice day.

Not sure what difference that will make in her life, but it sure made me feel better. Beats stewing over how I’ll never reclaim that hour, ever again, for the rest of my life…

Has something like this ever happened to you?

What tries your patience? How do you handle it?

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