No Card, No Cash, No Aldi

The feeling you get while pulling into the Aldi parking lot is much the same as the defeat you feel while ordering hamburger steak when you probably should be enjoying filet mignon. Yeah, you think, I could do better. But what the hell. This'll do.

I don't know what draws me in. It's probably that Aldi is cheap and on the way home. Plus when I leave, I get to see what the nearby Gold Club (strip joint) has posted on their sign (this week: Come See Our Stimulus Package).

On the way home from work, I trudge up to the door. I dig a quarter out of my pocket to unlock a shopping cart, mosey inside and proceed to stock up on cheap food. It's all in inexplicably random portions at Aldi. The smallest can of pears could feed a band of guerrillas for a week, while the largest tin of corn wouldn't provide me with enough nourishment to blink. Surprisingly, the mahi mahi is well-sized and looks tasty.

All of this is, of course, a prelude to the Standoff In The Checkout Line, which comes about because I can't pay. I want to. In fact, I whip out my Capital One card and swipe it a few times and then scratch my head as I realize Aldi does not take credit or personal checks, only debit or cash, of which I have neither. My debit card is lost somewhere at home, probably in the vicinity of my recliner, where I had lost it a week earlier after buying some cheap trinket online.

My inability to pay causes a lot of consternation in the face of the cashier, who explains the credit/debit rule to me with a tone that tells me she's told this story before. Still, you do not want to be the guy who can't settle his bill at Aldi. To put it mildly, it's not good for your pride.

This is where the Standoff In The Checkout Line really turns into a standoff, because I don't want to tell this woman I have no way of paying for all the food in my cart. I also don't want to tell her I will run up the road to hit the ATM, because I can't. But after a few awkward moments where nobody speaks and the rest of the line stares daggers at me, I decide to go for option B. At least that will give her the hope that I will come back and pay for all this stuff.

I slink into the parking lot and start to improvise. I call a friend:

ME: Hey, if I were to write you a check for $40, would you run to the cash
machine right now and get me $40?
HIM: Dude, I don't have $40.
ME: Fair enough.

I get back in the car, snicker at the sign at The Gold Club and speed over to my bank to make a withdrawal. I think it may be open, even though it's 5:3o and I know it's not. I arrive. It's not open. I don't know why I thought it would be.

Next, I get the bright idea to go to another grocery store (which actually takes credit cards) and try and cash a check, even though I know they won't. My exchange with the guy at customer service goes something like:

ME: Hey, I actually just bought some stuff at another grocery store, but
they don't take credit cards, and I need cash but don't have my ATM card, and
they're holding my food for me, and I'm wondering if you guys would cash this
personal check that I'm already starting to write out?
HIM: No.

I decide to pass on the check cashing joint on South Boulevard and go home. It's now been at least 25 minutes since I left my shopping cart alone to die of exposure next to the check-out of a bag-it-yourself credit-shunning food repository.

I feel like I've really failed. At this moment, the cashier at Aldi thinks I'm coming back to pay for a heaping mound of food. At some point, she'll realize that I've stood her up. Some lowly stock boy will forever curse my name as he replaces the things I've gathered from every forsaken corner of the store. The task will take hours. The mahi mahi will be ruined.

Plus, that cart still has my quarter.

What's worse is that after the 2o minutes of carefully looking for the cans without dents and the bananas without blemishes and the milk jug without a leak, I'm going to have to go to some other grocery store and do the exact same thing. I have an irrational hatred of supermarkets and buying food, which doesn't square with my love of eating food. It's kind of like being the kid who loves sitting the front row at Sea World but hates it when Shamu gets him wet.

Now at home, I get mad at my recliner. I'm angry because this whole thing started back when the chair swallowed my debit card. I've long since checked every cushion and crevasse and nearby swath of floor for that piece of plastic. Still, I decide to take out my frustration on my La-Z-Boy. I give it a good shove.

And lo, what is revealed underneath, resting in two inches of dust? My debit card.

Ten minutes later, I'm back at Aldi, bagging up the food that hasn't become either luke warm or thawed. I feel satisfied. I feel relieved. I feel like I've done a good thing.

The mahi mahi will turn out to be disappointing.

I ROTFL At Your Phone Call

Once upon a time, I thought there was no way that I would have enough to say to people to require a cell phone plan that gives me 200 text messages a month.

It turns out, I still don’t. But, in this brave new world where friends with unlimited plans can punish poor me with my mere 200 texts, I needed to upgrade. Yesterday, I trudged into my AT&T store and bumped up my limit to a hefty 1,500 messages a month. The associate did so with a veiled smirk on his face, the same one you’d have on your face if, say, an Amishman came in to your electronics shop and started inquiring about industrial-grade circuit breakers.

No, me and my little 200-message-a-month plan were just not cutting it, because all at once, all of the people I know decided that talking into a phone just wasn’t worth the effort. The avalanche of texts started piling up and made their way into my monthly bill, which was starting to add up. I suppose I caved after I heard the story of two guys with unlimited plans in Pennsylvania. They thought it would be a neat idea to try and set a record for text message volume and cranked out 217,000 of them back in March, only to find out that their T-Mobile unlimited plan wasn’t so unlimited after all. The final bill was nearly $26,000-- the box containing the itemized charges cost nearly $30 to send.

Here’s my favorite part: most of what these two guys sent to each other was something along the lines of “hello” and “LOL.” Think about that. You’re holding an incredibly sophisticated piece of technology in your hand, at least ten times cooler than the Get Smart shoe phone or the Dick Tracy radio watch. It’s a device Alexander Graham Bell would never have been able to fathom. And rather than use it to get some sort of important message across, maybe something that could save a life or avert a disaster or bring joy to someone‘s day, you decide to abbreviate the words “laughing out loud” because it takes too much time to type out. It’s as if Bell’s first telephone call had been changed from “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” to a more direct and typed-out “Where u at, playa?”

My text messages aren’t much better. They don’t convey my emotions or state of mind like my voice. I mostly find myself conveying information that centers on what bar I am at, or my precise location inside that bar. “I’m in the front,” I’ll type, before coming back with “I am here, where are you?” then, inevitably “I am wearing a funny looking hat,” because usually I am.

Once my friends find me, they’ll say hello before nervously pecking away at their keyboards as I attempt to have a conversation. In fact, the whole idea of actually talking to somebody has become quite archaic and quaint, like speaking Latin. Sure you can do it, but then somebody, quite rhetorically, decides to ask “Why would you do that?” and you find yourself without a really good answer.

Talking has simply gotten in the way. I don’t know why I’m upset about this, because usually when I go out, I end up losing my voice while trying to talk over some DJ’s idea of music. Besides, I’m really not much of a conversationalist at heart. I prefer writing my witty retorts, because I can add hyperlinks to them, so that you, the reader, will know what the hell it is I am talking about. It saves me the time of having to stop my story to tell you that I’m quoting “So I Married An Axe Murderer,” so that you’ll laugh at what I just said, which was probably not really that funny to begin with.

I do find it interesting in a “Footloose” sort of way that communities now see texting as the movie saw dancing: a devil-worshipping public menace. You’re no longer allowed to do it in most movie theaters, which befuddles wannabe critics who so desperately want to reveal plot twists, 160 characters at a time. North Carolina wants to make it illegal to text when you’re driving, which is probably a good thing. I don’t care what you’re driving. Some guy in Boston was apparently texting while behind the wheel of a trolley this weekend when he smashed smack-dab into the back of another trolley, and the ensuing crash sent 49 people to the hospital. The 24-year-old was sending messages to his girlfriend, the last of which probably was something along the lines of “WTF is up with all of this mangled metal?”

I understand why texting is not completely evil. I have friends that work some truly awful hours, and I’m never quite sure when they sleep. I would hate to call and wake them up just to say that I’d found some amusingly-shaped lint in my pocket, but I really don’t have the same kind of apprehension about sending a text. I’ll get something back that says “Lint? Bwaahahahahaha!” whether or not the person actually is laughing. That’s another advantage of text: your chuckles sound less forced when you put them in writing.

The odd thing about this is that I used to be against not just text messages, but the whole idea of having a cell phone at all. I existed in this sheltered fantasy world until 2004, when one night I waited for a friend to call and make plans for the evening. Only he never called. So, I sat at home, drinking by myself, trying to keep pace with the person who was at some tavern somewhere, boozing and cajoling and carrying on and having a good time, all the while forgetting to call me and let me know where he was. At some point, I swallowed my pride, stumbled over to the phone and called up my buddy, who was not only not at the bar, but asleep at home and wondering why I had drunk myself into a stupor in my living room. We were, as it turns out, supposed to hit the town a day later. If you only had a cell phone, he said. You could be out at the bar right now, instead of cooped up inside your apartment. He thought it was bless-your-heart idiotic that I’d sat there all evening long, next to the land line, waiting for his call, like some teenage girl from the 1950’s pining for her dreamboat to ring her up and ask her to the sock hop.

I got a cell phone the very next day.

At some point, I suppose I’ll have to accept the fact that it’s now a text based world and I’m just living in it. As I write this, I’m encouraged to see people sitting around at this Starbucks, talking with each other and carrying on and actually having a good time. The spoken word survives, although, across from me, a woman is getting a kick out of taking cell phone pictures of her friend sipping on a venti caramel macchiato. She just said she’ll attach the best one to a text message. I don’t know whether to LOL or cry.