After work for the last two weeks or so I’ve been stopping at the Giant Grocery that’s conveniently between the Metro station and my place. Each evening I go there and get a salad from the salad bar. It’s nothing special, but I figure it’s healthier than most of my other options and it’s only $2.68 – with dressing. Easy win, right?
Last night I witnessed the most ghetto salad bar patron in the world.
Curlers? Check. Shower cap? Check. Slippers? Check.
I swear, if the Giant allowed smoking, she would have had a cigarette in her mouth. She was standing in front of all three varieties of greens, blocking my access to all of them. She picked used spinach tongs and proceeded to pick not only the spinich but then used them to shuffle the Iceberg and Romaine around like she was looking for something int he bottom. Occasionally she’d toss a leaf or something from the buckets to her container, but mostly she just appeared to want to take up space and be annoying. She succeed.
When she was finally bored playing with the greens, she THREW THE FUCKING TONGS into the bucket of spinach so full of apathy it was practically utensil neglect, if there was such a thing. Why she hated those tongs so much, I’ll never understand. It doesn’t seem like much, but it was such a blatant disregard for the fact that I was probably going to use them in, oh, 20 seconds.
I could almost hear her thinking “Take your fucking tongs, asshole.”
Next, she moved on to the other parts of the salad bar. She used the same tongs for the shredded cheddar, the blue cheese and the shredded carrots. She used the same scoop for the croutons and the broccoli. It wasn’t the fact that the was doing it necessarily — I’m sure I’ve accidentally done this as well — it was just the dissociation she had with everyone waiting for her to finish while doing it.
By the time she left there were croutons in the broccoli, cheese in the lettuce, broccoli in the cucumbers. There was sunflower seeds in with the carrots, cauliflower in the feta. She just fucked the whole salad bar up, throwing food and tongs around like she owned the place.
I so so happy to see her close the lid of her plastic container and walk away that I hardly cared that she drug a piece of broccoli through the vat of cottage cheese and popped it in her mouth as she left.
