Small Annoyances at the Grocery Store

Like most grocery stores, the one near my house has a loyalty card. These can be a great thing. If used effectively, they can really save shoppers a lot of money. The thing about this particular store is that they recently replaced their old loyalty card with a new one. That means that the card I had is now obsolete. No worries, they gave me another. But the new card has caused me more headaches than I can count.

First of all, I had to give my cell phone number to register for the new card. Then I received a text with a link that I was supposed to click in order to verify my card. The problem is I still have an ancient phone that does not have internet access. Text messages I can get, but clicking on a link isn't going to work. That means in order to use my card I have to pick up my phone and call an actual number and activate it. I just plain don't want to do that. I hate doing that kind of thing. Always have. Always will.

Well, I can still get points on my card if I just give my cell phone number to the cashier at the store. It's slightly more annoying than handing over the card itself, but it works. The problem is, the first few times I told the person at the counter my number I apparently spoke in tongues or something. On more than one occasion, with two or more different cashiers, I said the number, causing the woman at the counter to look at me with knitted brows. Then she (the various "she's" who took my number on multiple trips to the store) repeated the number for confirmation, and invariably got the last two digits wrong. Every single time.

The last few times I've been to that store, I've been overly conscious of the way I say the number. I want to make sure I'm understood. So I've been using a trick I learned from my days of doing community theatre. It was pounded into my head over and over again that in theatre, your voice should go up at the end of a sentence. Quite often in regular conversation, we end our sentences by going down, but in theatre, things go up. That's because if you're on a stage trying to be heard by people in the back row, if you inflect your voice down the audience will lose the last few words of what you say. I thought that was maybe what was happening to me at the grocery store. So I began inflecting up at the end every time I said my cell number.

My method seemed to work. The cashiers could hear me and understand me. But the trials and tribulations are far from over. The most recent time I went grocery shopping I said my cell number and then the cashier looked at me with eyebrows raised and a smile on her face. "Are you sure?" she asked me. Not quite understanding what she was getting at, I just kind of smiled back at her in an attempt to silently communicate my confusion. Then she said, "The way you said your number, you sounded like you were asking a question." I just can't win!