#33 Smell-checker

I was at the grocery store the other day. Somehow the banal act of grocery shopping always leads me to these little epiphanies, mini-piphanies I call them. Not great flashes of revelation or anything, just little snapshot insights into the human condition. There’re only two checkers operating that day and they’re both—well—they’re both checkers who I know slather on the stinkwater a little too thick, and I’m just not in the mood to have my nostrils catch on fire, so I decide, what the heck, I only got a couple of items here, I’ll just boop myself.
So there I am patiently trying to figure out the code to enter for broccoli crowns by looking at the little chart over the computer monitor and I hear this lady cursing across the way. “That price is not right!” she says angrily and tries to give the item in her hand another pass across the booper and of course the machine keeps telling her to “place the item in the bag,” in that same voice cops use when they tell you to “put down the weapon,” and she keeps trying to re-boop and the checkout caregiver whose job it is to hold customers hands through the complex ordeal of actually running a scanner—"Land-o’Goshen, Maybel. I done checked myself out, yee-haw"—is busy on the phone with what appears to be a crisis at home involving her teenage daughter and a sudden collision with a pizza delivery driver, so the irate lady at the scanner manages to get the system and herself so fried she collapses on the floor and starts whimpering. Her hands go limp and the item she has heretofore been clutching slips onto the floor. I go over and pick it up, thinking that maybe I can help this poor, now-blubbering creature in some way and I see it’s a small bottle of dish soap. That’s when I start to laugh. Loudly. I’m sorry, I can’t help it. Life is just too crazy. The bottle says Ultra Palmolive Aromatherapy Anti-Stress Concentrated Dish Liquid. Startled by my outburst, the lady gets up, snorts, glares at me, grabs the bottle and the rest of her groceries and flounces over to one of the checkout stands with a smelly checker. Hey lady, I think, chill. You need to stop and smell the dish liquid, dudette. Life’s gonna pass you by if you freak out over every malfunctioning computer.
But there you have it. Another example of a simple product—dish soap for gosh sake—being transformed by the magic of verbiage into some wonderful gift from the land of serenity. Aromatherapy “Anti-Stress” dish liquid. Does that imply there are other types? Aromatherapy “Morning Wake-Up Energizing” dish liquid? Aromatherapy “Bridges of Madison County Feeling a Little Maudlin” dish liquid? Hey, I don’t know about you, but anti-stress for me is not having to do the dishes at all. And I certainly am not ready for all this new age stuff in my kitchen sink. What next? A new shape of mayonnaise jar to improve my refrigerator’s fung shui?
America, ya gotta love it.