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One of my pet peeves is people allowing their children to ride on the ends or sides of shopping carts. I really think someone's going to kill a kid doing that one of these days, and yesterday I almost saw it happen.
I was off from my store yesterday and getting ready to do some baking. I opened the sugar can to start making sugar cookies. Not much in there, better add some more. I opened the cabinet, got out the bag and started shoveling scoops of white powder into the canister.
Flour. Fuck.
So I got in my little gray car and drove to The Jungle: any grocery store in Fayetteville the day before Christmas. (In this case, it was a Food Lion.) I got a cart and started picking up a few things, and got passed by a woman pushing a cart with four kids hanging off it--two on the front, one on each side.
About ten seconds later...big crash. She pushed her cart out into the cross aisle and another woman who was going hell-bent for leather with three kids hanging off her cart and a cell phone glued to the side of her head smashed into the first woman's cart. One kid got knocked backward into the racking and was bleeding from the back of his head, all the kids are on the floor, lots of wailing (from the kids) and screaming (from the mothers).
So I got a couple of the grocery store's people over there to supervise. We got the paramedics over there to check out the kids. The one that was bleeding from the head got taken to the hospital, and his mom and the rest of the family went with them. After they left I asked and found out that their "designated biohazard person" wasn't there that day so they'd have to block off the area. I'm a hazmat-certified associate at Home Depot, so I helped them remediate the hazard. (Hey, it beats the shit out of remediating the riot that would take place if they had to cordon off the bay with the sugar in it the day before Christmas, and it only takes a few minutes to do it.)
Now for the worst part: after this woman saw the carnage she was a part of, after she saw a child who was riding on a shopping cart get taken away in an ambulance (I figure he was fine, but it can't hurt to be sure), after all this, the last thing I heard her say was, "come on kids, get back on, we've got to get back to shopping." All three of her kids jumped right back on the cart and off they went.
Ugh.
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