It was New Year’s Eve. I had a 20%-off- wine coupon that was set to expire at midnight. I went to the grocery store that issued the coupon and pulled a case of wine—4 bottles each of Cab Franc, Saint-Émilion and Chianti—and headed for the checkout. The only available cashier was a guy I usually avoided. Not because he was rude or incompetent. Not because his chlorotic tint and deadpan attitude bothered me. Not because he made arbitrary comments about my groceries and would announce the total in thousands of cents. But, rather, because of something else. Something discomfiting that I couldn’t quite define.
I’ll give you an example of a typical interaction with this guy. The previous week when I’d gone through his checkout station, among my groceries were a rack of ribs and a pack of tofu. After scanning the items, he said, “Are you going to make the tofu taste like the ribs?”
Was that a vegan-vs-meat joke? I thought. I couldn’t tell. I replied, “I’ll probably use that Gochujang paste on both. So, yeah, I guess the tofu could end up tasting like the ribs.”
“Your total is five thousand two hundred seven cents.”
I was sure that a similarly senseless commentary would attend my present wine purchase. So I braced myself. But after he rang-up the bottles he said nothing about the wine, which surprised me. I found the digital coupon on my phone and showed it to him so that he could scan it.
“That’s a coupon for bread,” he said.
I looked at my phone again. He was right. How could I have missed that? Why hadn’t I worn my glasses when searching for it? And where were my glasses, anyhow?
“Sorry,” I said. “My eyes.”
He laughed. “The wine coupon has a bottle on it. That one has a loaf on it.”
I tapped menus and swiped through a blur of coupons and offers. I was the dude who couldn’t tell a bottle from a loaf.
“It’s in the Digital Offers section,” he said.
I found it and showed him my screen. He grabbed the handheld scanner and aimed it at my screen. The scanner blinked out.
“Did the coupon go through?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “My scanner died.”
He turned the scanner sideways to show me. Sure enough, the light was off.
“What’s up with that?” I asked.
“I am,” he said. “These handhelds always die on me. It isn’t just this one. They all do it. On every register.”
He turned to the cashier adjacent and asked, “Hey, would you mind scanning this coupon for me?”
She crossed over to his register and without asking why—she’d obviously done this before—took the scanner, scanned the coupon and went back to her register as if it were nothing out of the ordinary.
“See?” he said. “Another checker uses the same scanner and it works.”
“I wonder why,” I said.
“When I was three, I died.” He waited for my reaction.
“Huh?”
“They brought me back. I don’t remember it. No white light or anything.”
“So you think it’s an electromagnetic thing?” I asked.
“Yeah. It’s some kind of electromagnetic charge that messes with these handhelds. That’ll be eight thousand seven hundred forty-eight cents.”
I’d read that electrical device malfunctions were common among those who have near-death experiences. But this was the first time I’d witnessed the phenomenon.
I pushed my cart out of the store and stood in the rain awhile, reviewing the episode—my struggle to find the coupon, my failure to wear my glasses (which were in my pocket), the cashier’s device failure, his confession of a near-death experience, his usual announcement of the total in thousands of cents.
I spent another minute trying to figure out whether it was easier to carry the box of wine to the car or push it in the shopping cart. Then I realized that I had to get out of the rain and, without thinking, pushed the shopping cart to the car. As I put the box in the trunk, I remember laughing a bit. What should have required no thought at all was the easiest thing to do.