Not that it matters exactly why the woman in front of me at the express self-checkout line earlier this evening huffed for sixty seconds as the man in front of her dug repeatedly into his pockets for penny after penny so that he could deposit exact change into the coin slot for his purchases, but she did neglect to spend any part of those sixty seconds retrieving her Stop & Shop Card from her purse, beginning the thirty-second task only after the punctilious fellow left, and this oppugned my naïve assumption that impending delay was the primary object of her disapprobation. Also, I discreetly snickered when, a moment later, the conveyor belt abruptly reversed direction, and the self-checkout machine’s computerized voice instructed the woman to rescan all of her items.

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