girlfiend

Yesterday I went back to school shopping for Boyfiend. Gap and Old Navy were both having great sales that I was able to combine with discount coupons, but they didn’t have much in the way of dress shirts or pants in the sale section. I ended up at Ross where I purchased the majority of the stuff on his list- socks, underwear, shirts, slacks and ties- and my major impulse buy, the counter top composter.

Of course almost none of it fit him. So I went back to the stores today to return the ill-fitting items and buy some stuff that fit. Gap was easy, Old Navy was crowded and the lines took forever, but the returns took no time (even the bathing suit purchased in July that I’d lost the receipt for) and I found a variety of pants in different styles that I’d dismissed yesterday. Ross was a nightmare. The store was mobbed. I planned on picking up a belt for him since I accidentally bought a child’s size belt yesterday, but the line was so long and so full of angry looking people that I decided B would do just fine without.

By the time I reached the front, the line behind me stretched across the store and the cashier in whose line I was stuck clearly hated his job and wasn’t very good at it. He was muttering, sighing and rolling his eyes. Not at the customers- he wasn’t blatantly rude or anything, but he was exasperated and asking his coworkers why there weren’t more cashiers working. He moved as slow as molasses and each customer seemed to take longer than the one before. Finally, after what seemed like hours, I handed him my receipt and the return items. He slowly, slowly looked at each tag and highlighted the corresponding item on the receipt. It seemed to tax him as though he was doing quadratic equations. He then scanned each item, making sure the scanner and the tag were aligned just so, until the register made a noise and spit out a receipt. “You can’t return this,” he told me and went back to his meticulous scanning. I asked why and he shrugged and told me he didn’t know.

Another employee who seemed to be in charge of returns came over and he asked her why I couldn’t return the shirt. She looked at the receipt, looked at the shirt and told him she didn’t know. They called over another employee. She didn’t know either. Then another. This one figured out that the highlighted item did not match the tag on the shirt. None of the items on the receipt matched the tag on the shirt. It took another ten minutes of poring through the receipt before someone came to the conclusion that I hadn’t actually been charged for the shirt the day before, hence the register’s insistence that it could not be returned. All of that confusion and endless waiting for a shirt I didn’t actually pay for. Shit, if I’d known I would have had him keep the damn shirt and wear it anyway. Instead they took the shirt, processed my return, and I left. In the rain.