whatever happened to...

good, old-fashioned common sense? or maybe that should read competence?

i mostly do my shopping at iga in st kilda... all of the staff are courteous, and most competent - but i shudder when i'm next in the queue if there's one particular young womon on one of the checkouts - iga's setup is that you just stand in one long queue until called - i watch with dread when i'm getting closer to being called and this particular cashier is getting closer to finishing with her customer...

i have to say here she is a lovely, friendly young womon - always very cheery and chatty (she's doing a creative writing course, hopes to be a writer some day) - but perhaps this is one of her 'problems' - chatting and not taking notice of what she's doing... her weighing of things leaves a lot to be desired - one day i was charged $16.99 for one bulb of garlic when she served me, and if you watch her closely (which i suggest you do) she just rests her hand on the scales while weighing! we weighed the garlic again and it came to $1.89! now that's a big difference - it's not like i've got money i can afford to pay out for nothing - shows the necessity for vigilance (similar 'mistakes' have happened in the past!)...

then there are the fruit and veg items she's unsure of - if you check your docket you'll notice a number of things that appear on it but aren't in your shopping bag - but you'll have other items that don't appear on the docket - pity you're mostly getting charged for more expensive items - apparently anything unrecognisable to her is exotic and costly! personally i prefer someone to ask me "what's this"! call me naive but i'd assume there'd be staff training in food identification if that's part of their job!!

another problem - packing... now i've noticed a few youngsters have a problem in this area - they put the bread and tomatoes and anything squashable into the bag first and anything heavy just goes right on top... what's that all about - surely common sense tells you heavy stuff first, soft squashy stuff on top!!!! is this the secret management plan to do away with staff packing bags altogether?

yeah, you can tell i had a bad supermarket moment today - i got that young womon, after being called to another checkout to be told the young lad couldn't serve me because i had a bottle of wine and he didn't 'have a licence to sell alcohol yet' - that was the first thing i put on the counter but he waited until i had unpacked my basket before telling me - that meant packing everything back up again and going to the end of a now much longer queue... i was really pissed off!!! i suggest if they can't swipe through the alcohol iga sells, instead of calling 'next', they need to qualify it with 'next customer without alcohol'!!!!

sorry, i just had to have that gripe...

and now i'm going to have a glass of that wine while i do some baking - a veggie pie and a chocolate cake - good old (vegan) comfort food! - and then i'm going to settle down and watch some movies - perhaps i'll watch "Splice", about genetic engineering, then maybe "Daybreakers", an australian produced vampire movie with claudia karvan, sam neill, ethan hawke and willem dafoe - should be interesting at the very least!

i'll leave you with an amy winehouse video - a very talented young womon with so much potential and such a beautiful, powerful voice - but sadly a troubled young womon addicted to crack cocaine and alcohol and surrounded by sycophants - dead at 27...  farewell young sister...