“What is this?”
March 30, 2006, 12:37 AM
Sometimes people just astound me. First of all, I was very disappointed to find that Mike Brooks, one of my DC buddies, has been “disinvited” from the Infoshop. Translated, “disinvited” basically means “banned”. I was quite disappointed by that, and I considered that a major loss-of-cool-points for the Infoshop.
The other oddball thing at the Infoshop, which is in on the whole anti-Starbucks thing, was what I found on a shelf tucked away in the corner: Two packets of Starbucks Decaf. Seeing that, I held it up to show the attendant at the desk, and said mock-disapprovingly, “What is this?” The attendant didn’t have an answer for that one.
Meanwhile, I’m sure that Sis, who, on A16, left a demonstration to go to Starbucks, is going to really get a huge kick out of my Infoshop find.
Otherwise, I found quick food near Old Town in Alexandria. There’s a Whole Foods Market behind the Old Town Transit Shop, and it’s got a hot bar and a salad bar like Martin’s in Waynesboro. Notice I didn’t say “cheap food”, though. I said “quick food”. The reason is that Whole Foods is pretty darn pricey. Martin’s, which I consider expensive, looks dirt cheap when compared to Whole Foods.
And lastly, something I never thought I’d see happened at Sheetz in Haymarket on the way home. A woman with an attitude and an employee nearly got into a fight. The woman went inside while pumping her gas, leaving her car unattended. Bad. Employee informed the woman that she shouldn’t leave the pump unattended while fueling, citing that it was a safety hazard. The woman countered by saying that she was a firefighter and knew what’s a hazard and what isn’t. The employee turned off her pump remotely. Woman went back outside. She discovered that her pump had been turned off. She was upset about having her pump shut off. She threatened the employee, telling him that he should turn her pump back on before she hurt him. That set the employee off. He pretty much lost it right there and went right down to her level, shouting even more loudly than she was. The confrontation was defused when other Sheetz employees got the irate employee to go into the back room. This was followed by profuse apologies to the woman by the other employees.
I was just like, whoa, as I had just witnessed something I’d really not expected to witness, while I was making myself a cup of hot tea for the ride home from DC. I don’t know what Sheetz’s procedure is for handling people who don’t stay with their vehicle while fueling, but now I’d like to know, mainly to see for myself if the employee followed established procedure up until the shouting and threatening started.
I have to say, though, that the woman was just awful. She cited firefighter-ness and age (allegedly twice as old as the employee) as reasons to let her do whatever she wanted. I considered the woman to be totally in the wrong from the get-go. I consider the employee to only be in the wrong from the point where he lost his temper.
Their real mistake, which never crossed anyone’s mind that night except mine, it seemed, was in the failure for an employee to call police the moment that the woman made her threat. Still, stupid, stupid, stupid people… all over something really minor, too.
Otherwise, though, the trip home was uneventful.
Song: Don't have one right now.
Quote: Of course, the reason I listen to these AM radio stations from distant markets at night is because WMRA (Harrisonburg's NPR station) plays classical music overnight, which I can't handle for a late-night drive home. WETA out of DC has BBC news overnight, which is better. But I finally completely lose WETA when I get to Woodstock, and I start to pick up another station on 90.9. So it's either static or finding something else. Usually I'll end up listening to WGN from Chicago, on AM 720.
Categories: DC trips, Radio, Some people