The Incident at Wal-Mart

If you’ve forgotten how to be embarrassed all the way from your blushed cheeks down to the tips of your toes, I can remind you.  Just pretend you’re me for the next minute or so.

First, you (like me) make an out-of-character decision to visit the monster of American superstores, Wal-Mart, to have your Christmas photo cards printed.  Upon entering the store, you’re blasted with oppressive culinary aromas, something like sloppy joes mixed with scorched popcorn. 

Tired mothers with noisy kids shuffle behind their carts like slow-moving wind-up toys. An older bent-over man stares at the floor, captivated by the tile, and an oriental woman stops repeatedly to study the departmental signs written in a language foreign to her. 

There’s so much junk everywhere.  Toys and Christmas decorations smell like chemical-laden plastic. Artificiality squeezes you from all sides until you want to turn and run outside past the mammoth parking lot and 4-lane highway toward grass and trees and fresh air.  But you keep on task and walk back and back, past the sparkly plastic poinsettias, past the children’s gruesome-looking winter hats with skull and crossbones and evil-looking monsters (why?), and eventually approach the photo department, thoroughly overwhelmed with the pressing realities of consumerism.  You’re resolved to get those cards printed TONIGHT.

Feeling victorious upon reaching the photo desk, you whip out your trusty thumb drive and pretend you know what to do with it - the one programmed with family pictures by your techno-son.  You stick the little silver tongue in the self-help monitor that should be user-friendly but operates nothing like your amicable computer.  You hit a few commands and find yourself at a dead end.  You sigh.  You hit some more and hold your head in your hands.

The attendant comes and gets you back on track.  She leaves.  You make another mistake and moan.  She comes back. This goes on and on…and on.  Then voila, in a moment of coup de grace when you think you’re almost finished, you erase the entire order and have to start over. From scratch.

More painful eons pass, and finally the order is complete.  You wander off to kill time and gawk at the rows and rows of things you don’t want or need while the whirring machine prints your cards.  At the appointed time, you return to the photo desk, happy the ordeal is almost over and you can soon LEAVE.

There they are, all four bulging paper sleeves.  But ALAS!  When you check a card, you discover you clicked on the WRONG PHOTO from among those on the thumb drive and have 200 Christmas cards with an OUTDATED picture!!  *blush*

The attendant, who has been programmed by now to expect your ineptness, seems hardly shell-shocked.  She offers to re-print them all for free. “It’s just paper,” she says, her face expressionless. 

“But shouldn’t I pay for these wrong ones?” you stutter.  “It’s my fault.  That’s a lot of waste.”

“It’s just PAPER,” she repeats.  “I’ll print you some more.”  That is very kind, and probably reflects story policy, but it doesn’t erase your self-consciousness.

You are sweating profusely at this point, feeling feverish, old, techno-dumb, and embarrassed by the wastefulness of both time and product.  Eyes flood with leaky emotion while you reenter the order yet one more time, not without with help from the attendant who knows how to remediate the pictures, but isn’t quite sure how to remediate YOU.

This time the wait takes longer.  You sit on a stool in the photo department, exhausted and stuck in this retail cave, and watch the ongoing parade of sober-faced shoppers.  The food smells waft to the back of the store, thick, spicy, greasy. On the counter lies a stack of sample photos of kids posed with a tired-looking Santa. You wonder about the lives behind all those faces – the mischievous little boys, the girl with the hot pink sweatshirt, the crying baby with the pacifier.

The attendant remediating your fiasco seems to have evaporated, so you wander over to the electronics department and ask for help.  Oh sure, they say.  They’ll send someone.

That someone shows up, but hasn’t a clue who you are or what happened to your order.  So you have to tell THAT PERSON everything: true confessions again.  He’s young, and male, and out of his element.  He finds the second printing of your Christmas cards and fumbles them like a deck of flyaway playing cards in the midst of a bad shuffle. He can’t make them stay in stacks.  “Here, I can do that,” you suggest, trying to be helpful. 

He hands them over but refuses eye contact – a male ego thing, you suppose.  You can tell he just wants to get out of there, to go back to wherever he belongs in his other little corner of Wal-Mart. So you swipe your credit card, whisper thank-you, and head for the exit sign.  He hurries the other direction. 

Your leftover blush burns hot and flaming.  It follows you out the door, into the crisp night air, through the dark countryside all the way home, until finally some flickering candles, soft music, knitting needles, and the writing of this blog shoo it away.

“It’s just paper,” you tell yourself.  And, as you and I both know, you’re right.