Pet Peeves - Saliva on Shopping Bags

Licking Fingers Before Bagging Purchases

I hate it when people slide their shoes while they're walking… The sound is like such a lazy sound… I mean, I can understand if someone is really worn out because they had a long hard day perhaps working hard in the yard or maybe he or she is sick and can just barely move their legs never mind pick up their feet. Perhaps he or she is about to get an operation or just came through surgery or something like that… But when people slide their feet simply because they are too lazy to pick them up… That really gets on my nerves!

What I hate even more, however, is what happened in the store while I was trying to scan an item in a self-checkout lane. The scanner failed to pick up the numbers. This may have been because the item I was scanning was too big to fit into the small area where the red light could run over the price tag. Deciding to forgo using the scanner and instead attempting to key in the Universal Product Code (UPC) numbers seemed like a good idea but the machine said the code was invalid. As a result, I took the item over to one of the workers for assistance.

But hold on…

Allow me a moment to backtrack…

Prior to my stepping to the register to scan my purchases, the worker I would eventually ask for assistance had licked fingers on each of her hands and then used the salivated fingertips to separate plastic shopping bags conveniently hanging from hooks next to the register. These were the plastic shopping bags awaiting for customers to insert goods they were buying. In that I have a pet peeve about people licking papers or plastics that I must eventually handle, I decided to put my purchases inside of a basket I was buying. This way, I would be able to avoid utilizing the plastic shopping bags the worker had opened with her salivated fingertips.

Back to the incident…

Knowing the worker had salivated fingers, when I went to ask her for assistance with inputting the numbers from the basket’s UPC code, I held the basket to the left of my body. In this manner, I was holding the basket away from the worker. I am certain the attentive can tell when someone is holding something away from them… You know… such as… This is for me to touch but not for you touch… As I held the basket to my left in one hand, a finger on my other hand pointed to the numbers while I asked my question. All I wanted was for the worker to confirm which numbers I needed to key into the register so that the system would validate my item. She did not need to touch the basket or its price tag in order to answer my question.

Well…

Apparently...

Those thoughts existed only in my mind and NOT in the worker’s reality…

and thus…

She went out of her way, as if unable to see that I was holding the item away from her… as if she could not comprehend that I wanted her to talk about… to explain… but not to touch as “I” not “she” fingered the UPC numbers on the price tag…. and thus… She went out of her way to move in a bit closer so that she could reach over and touch the tag with her germy saliva-coated fingertip!

I cringed…

‘Good grief!’ I thought.

'What is wrong with some people??'

After she gave me the information I needed, I went back to the register to input the numbers again.

Voila!

What she told me had worked and the scanner validated my purchase…

Happy to have acquired this new info would have been more sweet and less bitter had the worker not touched the price tag on the basket... But because she did... with a saliva stained pointer... Now... I didn't want to touch it!  So, now... I was in the process of purchasing an item I no longer wanted to touch... I had already taken out my precious time to get one of the better baskets from its shelved bunch and now... thanks to the finger licker... it was tarnished... no longer better than its shelved cohorts...

'All right...' pondered my thoughts on the item… 'Should I take the basket back to the shelf and get another one? Should I use one of the bags since the basket was infected now anyway? Should I skip over the saliva soiled bag and use the one behind it?' [Trying that still would’ve meant I’d have to touch the germy bag to get it out of the way.]

Ultimately, I decided to carefully slip the basket into one of the soiled saliva bags without touching the bag handles; and then to place my remaining purchases into a large basket I was buying. This allowed me to keep the contaminated items separate from the clean ones.

I paid for the goods and then meticulously placed the soiled bag into the larger basket in a manner that prevented the handles from touching anything. Unfortunately, echos of my daughter's words reminded me... as she had done in person on numerous occasions... that... "Germs crawl you know. They don't stay in just one place."

All the way out the store and across the parking lot to my car, all I thought about was that once I got home I would have to wash my NEW basket... maybe even the other baskets and the remaining purchases since germs crawl... Maybe I'd have to decontaminate the trunk of my car after removing the soiled sticker attached to the basket inside the finger-licked bag...

OMG!!

Yes… Licking fingers before opening things or separating items such as book pages, stacks of papers, plastic bags and so on is an act that disgusts me. I think it is totally gross and do not understand how people can repeat this act over and over again in situations such as work environments wherein they are dealing with the public and touching so many objects for hours on end without washing their hands. Even if you move beyond the fact that they are subjecting the belongings of others to their saliva, what about the fact that they are unnecessarily adding germs to their own mouths and bodies…

Okay… I admit… I have a problem with germs…

But this is why I utilize the self-checkout whenever possible in the first place…

So that…

Fewer hands that do not belong to me are handling my purchases…

But even if I did not have a germ problem, that does not mean I would be okay with people, in affect, salivating on my belongings!