Musings at Altitude

When I was a young officer in the military, I would tell people that when my career in the Air Force was over, I wanted to be the guy spraying tomatoes at the grocery store.  At the time, a good friend of ours was a store manager for Giant Foods, and we always smiled as he said he’d take me on in that role.

That was over 2 decades ago, and now they have automatic misters in the produce section so my dream of spraying the tomatoes has been overcome by technology.

Today at the store, I had the opportunity to practice for a different career – a bagger.  The store was busy enough that when we got in line, we had a cashier but no bagger and we had a cart full of groceries.  As the cashier rang up the groceries, I started to bag.  I made it to the third bag before a professional bagger threw me out and started unbagging the bags that I’d already done so that she could bag them right.  I guess there’s a code in bagging that says cold stuff can’t be bagged with stuff that isn’t cold, and I had made the grievous error of putting some mini cans of diet 7 up on the bottom of a bag with 2 packs of hamburger meat on top.  OH MY GOODNESS.  So, I was fired.

When I was younger, I was prone to load the dishwasher wrong so my wife would push me away and load it right.  I found that there were times where if I did things “wrong”, I wouldn’t have to do them again!  But this wasn’t one of those times.  I was very excited about jumping in and helping with the bagging, but my excitement quickly turned to humiliation when I got relieved of duties and my wife quickly announced to the world that I’d been fired.

So for now, I’ll stick to business as my career since spraying tomatoes and bagging have been denied to me.  I’ll keep searching though for that one career field that will bring contentment and peace to me long after the stress of business is gone.  Apparently, it won’t be at the grocery store.