| rev:text
| - "Are you ready for this?"
"Oh, God, not really" she looks up, " but I would like to eat soon."
My wife walked inside across our shaded courtyard, almost swimming in the perfect 85 degree air. We'd been dreading a return to that place. You know the way a serial killer returns to the scene of the crime? Well, I felt the opposite.
"Rotten meat?" She asks.
"Check."
"One's from the freezer, too?"
"Check."
She. Forgets. Nothing. Sharp enough to split the edge of an obsidian scalpel into thirds. And then again into ninths.
We drove. We were silent and NPR echoed the current nonsense. I grabbed the paper bag with our evidence and we walked, hand-in-hand, towards the customer service desk.
"Code 1. O. 1.8. Amy, tooooo customer service" Whatever that means. Had the same sour, low-grade flavor of our steaks in the bag, suggesting 'you deal with these pricks...Amy...I don't get paid well enough to enforce your policies'. The man looked down. He was preemptively ashamed of what was about to happen. To us. The couple with a simple request. Can we return this bad product from your store.
She came. Muttered to CSR 1, she'd be back and took the shorthand notes he had jotted down: club card number, dates, maybe an encrypted message suggesting "Hey, do we have to screw them again?"
A phone call. I can hear the headset. "Really...3 weeks later they want to return it!?"
I respond, through him, through the headset to her, Amy, the manager: " I can hear you. YES. That's what a responsible person does. Buys up a good deal, portions it. Freezes it. Thaws it tastes how bad it is. And comes back to exchange it."
"Babe" my wife presses her head against my shoulder.
"Can you go take a picture of the SKU, incase they don't know what it is."
"Dont do anything crazy. Got it?"
"I'm fine. I'll be here"
"Yeah. Anything crazy," says CSR 2, a chunky women, brown hair, a smile and glasses.
"She knows me well" I say to CSR 2, as my wife vanishes behind a lemonade stand that says "Starbucks" above it. "I'm wondering how the manager is going to handle this?" I say to her.
"Well, I just don't get most of the things management does here." An honest, bright smile.
"If it were my store, I'd offer anything but to make a customer stand here and feel like thieves for buying Rotten meat," I say. "Who keeps every grocery reciept for a month?"
A phone call, from the pit boss. No doubt watching on surveillance cameras hoping I would leave.
"I'm busy," says CSR2. "You can come tell them that yourself."
Soon, a determined to disatisfy, manager, with the gate of a homicide detective, walks up and shrugs her shoulder. "So. There's nothing."
"Nothing?"
"Maybe that's why it's bad because you froze it for so long?"
"No. So how are you going to deal with this?" I ask.
"Do you want a discount?"
"No. I'm not paying to replace what I already paid for?"
"Well...We can exchange it." Finally. 30+ minutes, dinner primed bellies roar back for me and my wife. "O.K. that's all we expect."
We're walking along side the beef packages.
"This is sad" My wife says.
"I know, what a shitty spot to put a customer in."
"Look, there they are."
Pale, "Petite sirloins" stare up at us, knowing how untrustworthy they look, they kind of turn and slime away to the side and say, "Dude, don't, really? You're going to eat me?"
"I can't. Lets just grill chicken." My wife, atomic sharp, has it in a bag and in the cart, starting to push the nose of the cart toward the exit. She knows I'm done. Hungry. But mostly we are both reexperiencing what we had on the drive. This is going to suck. Again.
At the counter, Amy is gone. But there is our neatly portioned pile of beef puss, further defrosting on the Customer service counter.
A quick exchange and...
"Call 1. O. 08. Amy" Lord...this is an out of the body experience.
Amy marches behind the counter, packing her homicide detective heat in her tone.
"We don't want those steaks, either," I say. "They look bad too and I don't want to eat them. We have the SKU, they're on sale, so we'll..."
"So you're looking for credit?"
"I mean, yea, I guess?"
"I have nothing for my records, everything I submit has to have a record," I feel myself drowning in a pool of management jargon that means F-All to me.
"So you can't exchange that meat for this meat?".
"No." Amy says.
In my mind I see the quiet car ride home from Frys playing like a trailer for the movie "Schindler's List".
I look to my wife. "I've got to go, again." Turning to Amy, packing a failing policy manual on her left hip and disposition of litigating with customers dangling beneath her turned up angular nose.
"You keep it."
And we left.
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