And it was all Tangello...

She's standing, patiently, unsure of herself, but clearly interested in me, eye shadow glistening in the spotlight, hair tied tight in a blonde bun. I'm not sure what to say, but I'm playing it cool as she calls me over, trying to think of something to break the ice, until her confidence rises, and she puts her hand in my basket and says "Frequent shopper card?" in a bogan, nasally voice, as she scans my apples over the scanner. A lot of people, tepidly affected by weak Fast Show sketches, think the single man shop in the supermarket can be a little sad and depressing, but not for me - it's something I don't think about very often. If there's supposed to be some sort of social stigma to a basket with a single lasagne and a can of coke in it, well, it's passed me by. She's not paying attention anyway, she's looking down the aisle forlornly, not even paying attention to her scanning or the quality of her bag packing. I think back to the giant massive supermarket in my home town in Scotland, the one that sells booze and TVs and magazines and has a gardening department, and how harried and frantic the middle aged, kids are out of the house husband left to live with a floozy called Kendra and left me with a mountain of bills, women are in there, battling all day long. This girl has nothing to do, I'm the only one in the queue, but my items are being disrespected, hurled into the bag at a fearful rate. Her ennui is somewhat depressing, taking the joy out of my Curly Wurly, but she's looking past even my tasty chocolate treat, causing me to avoid any kind of badinage in our brief meeting - she can't even be bothered to look at the price on the screen, almost taking an air scan as she stares blankly into space. I consider, for a moment, doing a runner just to see if she would notice, but she's tired, face and shoulders slumped, so close to a break, so close to chasing the fruit stacker she's eyeing up to the lunch room for flirtacious conversation, so, so very close...and then, as my individual fruit cups hit the bag and price is discussed, a family parks their gigantic, laden, meat filled to the brim trolley right up against her conveyor belt, just before she can flick the red teller closed sign in front of them. Defeated, she watches as the fruit stacker walks off, as her granola bar sits idly within view, uneaten, and she puffs her weary body up, forcing repartee outward as she says "Frequent Shopper Card?", the words dying in her throat...

If I know that expression, it's because it was my expression at her age - I had a lot less eye shadow, but you know what I mean - when I worked at a supermarket in Burnie. My Dad, with impeccable Scottish logic in reacting to poor school marks said "Yer oot tae work or yer oot tae work" - clearly negotiating room wasn't a Scottish strong point. So, I was oot tae work, as a checkout chick for two miserable part time years, friendless, aloof from the social events of the store, and most tellingly, unable to tell a tangello from an orange. Ah, what a problem that was - the fruit was keyed into the cash register by number, so you needed to know the type of fruit presented to you, and I didn't have the time nor inclination to learn the difference between a citrus orange, a Spanish orange or a tangello. They gave me diagrams, they made me walk amongst the fruit, they blindfolded me and had me do a taste test, but they couldn't make me care, and thus they didn't care about me. Bewildered single men and desperate pensioners would lurch frighteningly into the store late in the evening, holding our closure up as they bartered for the cheap discount chickens. Maybe they knew what a tangello was, but I didn't - occasionally, a fat girl, and it was always a fat girl if I'm honest, would rise above the muck of the temp level, and get a cushy job in the deli or cleaning the trays, but she didn't realise that was her job for life, ten, maybe twenty years flashing by in a haze of grease and red marker pen. Some days were vaguely passable, like collecting trolleys from the car park and making enough money in stray 20c coins to buy a cassette, or winning the fastest scanner competition from under the noses of the full timers and getting an extra 1/2 an hour for lunch for a month while they gristled and grumbled that their privilege was gone - but it was an exercise in horrific futility, a place of self importance and rank pulled over the most trivial of details (like knowing what a tangello was), a place where an entire day would be lost while two middle aged women fought violently over the right to man the microphone that called for price checks. A place of old women hassling over pennies, hassling over getting their groceries delivered...if not for my interest in human movement and behaviour, it would take therapy to get a lot of the futility of it out of my memory...

Thursday night was our singles night, and also the night where the chickens were at their cheapest. It also may have been dole day, the most horrible of all days, the day of stress when rosy cheeked stubbled faces (just the women) would press themselves near you to argue over whether Smiths chips were 1.84 or 1.74. The singles would mill around the fruit aisle, not only debating the correct definition of a tangello, but assembled in code, red basket, one melon, one carton of milk, leaving me wondering how anyone came up with that code (now that I think about it, I can't remember how I knew it - did someone on staff actually talk to me? That'd be a blur) or what would happen if a befuddled elderly gentleman with a melon and a carton of milk wondered why he was continually being hit on. Up and down they would go, studiously aware that the shopkeepers had cracked their code and were watching them watching other people adopting the same code who were watching them and deciding if they were ugly or not. I would be hard pressed in the eight items or less aisle, fending off the magazine buyers and the chit chatters, trying to crane my neck to see who was trying to pick up, to see if I knew them. My supervisor at the desk with the microphone was a desperately lonely woman with black tights and thick sturdy thighs who was forever trying to get us to work as a team, put L plates on the counters of those who were struggling, and generally was a nightmare to talk to. She was firm that no chicken was to walk out the store, her words, and was cut when a rude drawing of her passed around, her naked chasing a walking chicken out of the store. Many years later, on one of my last visits to Burnie, I actually saw her on her own, black leggings still on, with "the code" adopted, unsure if it was co-incidence or...she told us once that she was going to a fabulous party, and she needed a night off, and was going to get ready for it and get her hair done and nails and...as it turned out, I had a night off as well, to no doubt go and get drunk and be a pain and the deliberately stroppy wonderman that I was. As I stood at the traffic lights, she went by me in her car, slowly and deliberately. I thought nothing of it until about ten minutes later, having been caught up in a fascinating discussion about Garbage with my friend, she drove past again...by the fifth time, I realised there was no party, there was no anything, she was just doing blockies round and round on her own, so at least if anyone called she wasn't home and could claim she was out raging. I don't think she was lost, well, emotionally perhaps, but it was desperately sad...unless she was chasing that chicken....

I think about those days a lot, what I learned, what I didn't learn, the self important politics of the workplace, the over reacting to the desperate crisis, the best way to steal some Panadol when you have a hang...hey, let's not get into that. I've got my groceries, my limited stock of groceries, and I'm sitting on the wooden bench drinking a bottle of water staring into space. The family with the trolley full of meat are arguing with the girl, who is now further away than ever from that granola bar. The argument is one sided and heated, apparently about some sort of chop that should be on special. Heads are lost, chests are puffed out in shimmering tracksuits, and the girl is a million miles away, staring down the aisle, barely making the attempt to pacify the situation, clearly from the expression on her face wondering why she has been stuck with this raw deal (and raw chop) just before lunch, thinking if only I had grabbed my little red sign a second sooner, if she's thinking anything at all. A supervisor gets involved, but the voices of the tracksuited duo are louder, and they attempt to draw other customers into their little tiny chop shaped world. The kids are paying as much attention as the girl, running amok and trying to steal plastic bags, and everyone around the chop family is plainly embarrassed, refusing to accept their protestations that the scandal of the chop price is "worse than Bosnia". In the end, everything passes over, maybe they got their discount, maybe they didn't, but the girl is sincere in her "have a nice day" - and I know she is, because she's saying it to herself, like I used to do, telling herself that most people are good...the supervisor, being the kind of person that she no doubt is to have that job, will blame her behind her back, the customers will blame her in the car on the way home, but right now, it doesn't matter - she gleefully grabs her granola bar, strides purposefully down the canned fruit aisle, an elderly woman customer smiling and supporting her, and as she gets to the boy she clearly adores stacking the fruit on the shelf, she gives him a cheeky squeeze right on the arse, and heads off for a well earned rest...

Not a single thought about chop prices will pass through her head for the rest of the day....