A Fishy Situation

Why is it whenever you have a limited amount of time to get something done, you end up surrounded by incompetent morons?

Case in point, Friday afternoon I had a small window of time to run out and get a few errands done. Food shopping at Shop-Rite was one of those errands. First thing on the list was to hit the fish department for some clams for Saturday night's dinner. Because the deli area/fish department can be crowded, I ran over there first to see how much time it would take.

Good news, only one woman in front of me and she's in the middle of her order. How long can it take right? Unlike cold cuts where someone might order four or five different items, fish purchases are usually only one or two items.

It seemed that the worker was taking a longer time to get the fish together than was necessary, but whatever, how long could it take right? Ok, she finishes with that item and the customer orders something else. A dozen craw-fish. A dozen crawfish. Now a dozen crawfish aren't really enough to do anything much with, but that's not my business. My business was watching the worker attempt to reach the crawfish which were in a plastic bowl toward the front of the refrigerated case.

Now if it was me, I would grab that plastic bowl out of the case so I would not need to reach into it. But no. The worker decided to reach in and... stretching as far as she could and grabbing them ONE BY ONE.

I stood there in total disbelief. I looked at the woman whose order was being filled and by the look on her face, this did not seem odd. That might have been even scarier than the idiot behind the counter. So after reaching into the case twelve separate times, the order was complete and it was my turn.

Two dozen Little Neck clams. I thought I might lose it completely if I saw her start to grab one clam at a time, but no, something even better. There were three types of clams for sale and she did not know the difference between them. So as I stood there mentally hearing the tick-tock of minutes passing, she decided her day was too tough, gave up, and called over another worker to complete the order.

It should have taken maybe seven minutes for the woman in front of me to finish her order, and mine to be filled as well. It took twenty.

Tick Tock.