Supermarket Surrealism

Monday, 9 July 2007

So anyway - I'm at the supermarket. I'm exhausted. It's 6:15pm  and I'm waiting in the checkout queue leaning on my trolley and checking out the covers of the trashy mags.  There is only one person in front of me and a few people behind me.  Suddenly I snap out of my magazine induced daydream and notice it's my turn to unload all my stuff onto the conveyer belt, in fact the conveyer belt is almost empty so I should have probably started 30 seconds ago.   I look down at my trolley and realise that it is filled with nothing but  soap.  And I mean filled.  TO THE BRIM  . With nothing but SOAP.  Weird. Cos soap wasn't even on my shopping list. Even if it had been, I wouldn't have needed the thousand or so bars that had magically appeared in my trolley.   It was SO weird.  So anyway - knowing that I could never afford all that soap I backed my heavily laden trolley out of the queue (what on earth had the other customers thought as they queued up behind me?)  and went back to where I had last seen my own items.   I think the chain of  events that resulted  in my surreal experience started when I parked my trolley in the shampoo aisle and wandered up the aisle trying to find some Detol.  When I returned, instead of grabbing my own trolley  I must have then siezed the trolley filled with soap belonging to a shelf stacker. I hadn't managed to find the Detol so I had nothing to add to my trolley and thus I didn't notice the new contents.  I'm glad the trolley parked in that position didn't contain any small children or I really would have been in trouble if I'd made it as far as I did.  I'm also really amazed I didn't once glance into the trolley right up until it was time to unload it onto the conveyer belt.  And did the shelf stacker just watch me take their trolley ? I saw no signs of them when I found my original trolley - perhaps they had gone to report a woman clearly planning some large scale bubble related terrorist act that required a VERY large number of  soap bars.   More likely they were lying on the floor laughing their pants off.