Is it too much to ask for people in the business of customer service to give us customer service?

Case in point: The last time I was in the grocery store, I became the victim of a check-out assembly-line which had evidently been cranked up to high speed; the idea being that the sooner one customer is processed and spit out, the sooner the next guy can be sent through the ringer and the sooner everyone gets to go home. It’s similar to being sucked in by an undertow where there’s a point of no return; Once your items are on the belt, it’s pointless to try and scoop them up to go over to lane 5 because someone just opened it…you’ll never make it.

I stood waiting at the conveyer belt while the woman in front of me was being helped. The cashier, who was evidently also the manager, was sliding her items past the scanner at a furious rate and all of them, eggs, bread, croissants…were piling up like cars on a foggy highway. The box boy, wasting no time, decided to conserve time and energy by asking her if plastic was alright even as he had already begun stuffing her groceries into one…in no particular order. She hadn’t answered his plastic bag question when the manager, being careful not to look at her for more than a nanosecond, asked: “Find everything OK?”

But it was too late! Already two questions behind, she had no chance to open her mouth when the cashier announced her total, forcing her into the financial part of the transaction. So she fumbled with her money, while the bagger piled her groceries into the cart and asked her if she wanted help out. It was purely a rhetorical question, as he had already started talking to another bagger as they went over plans for after work and the heavy drinking they would be doing later that night.

The lady gave up after the third question, I guess realizing they were not meant to be answered, and as she carefully put her change away, the manager began whisking my items toward the box boy, and an uncertain future in the bottom of a plastic bag. He had already thanked the lady but had begun my transaction while she was still standing there. Of course, when you’re drawn into this ugly game, your first instinct is to start nudging her out of what’s now your rightful place in front of the cashier and that little ledge where you’ll be counting out your cash or putting down your coupons or, if you’re really foolish, writing your check. My transaction had begun, but I was not part of it, and I felt cheated by having to hang back while she took my place at the trading post.

She was given her change and she began placing it in her purse. This she did with great care, but it was too late for her because the cashier was now talking to me and she was now officially out of the picture. She was history. She no longer existed. After a few more seconds, she took the hint and started moving off into the haze and out of our peripheral vision.

As I stepped toward the ‘ledge’, the cashier asked me how I was doing. He did this without looking at me and then said: “find everything OK?” and I said yes, although I wondered what he would do if I had said ‘no’. Would that stop everything cold? Would he stand there, he and the bagger, and stare at each other, not knowing what to do? Would it make their heads explode? I was tempted to do this and one day I will although I may regret it.

As I began getting ready to pay, the cashier, who you’ll recall I said is also the manager, started a conversation with the bagger about clocking in on time at the beginning of his shift, and coming back from lunch. The bagger, for his part, had an excuse for each offense and argued loudly with his boss, while the boss argued back, all in front of me and God and everybody.

I tried to be noticed. I waved a coupon and yelled, “Over here…HEY, over here!!”

He took the coupon and scanned it while the bagger, still gamely defending himself as being always on time because the union rules state that you have a ten minute grace period to clock in, threw my items in the bags. If he’d been careful about it before, and he was NOT, he was haphazard now, putting cantaloupe on top of eggs and muffins under laundry detergent.

At this point, I made a mistake that was to gum up the system for next few customers in line: I asked for a pen to write a check. This began a search for a pen that covered ten minutes and about 2000 square feet of the store. Customers behind me threw up their hands, sighed loudly and in general made me aware that I was an inconvenience and that if I held them up any longer, I would probably be signing the check in my own blood.

But a pen was found and I dashed off the check as quickly as I could while still being legible. As I signed it, the guy behind me in line had already seen his groceries scanned and put in bags and the lady behind him was being asked: “Did you find everything OK?”

She said “Actually, I couldn’t find the marshmallows…could you tell me where they are?”

As I walked toward the exit with my mangled and beaten groceries, I glanced behind me and saw the manager and bagger staring at each other. The store had gone strangely quiet and I could swear that the lights dimmed.

I left the store in a hurry

When I was growing up, there were seven channels on TV. Seven. Hard to believe these days when literally hundreds of them exist. But I can remember always being able to find something to watch.

That was when a new TV show was given more time to catch on than, say, 15 minutes into the first episode before being cancelled. So a lot of great stuff was allowed to ferment after harvesting.

And I did like the promise of new television shows.

For example, the Fall Preview issue of TV Guide was honored and celebrated in my world, and given a special pedestal on which to rest its glorious thickness. It came via the smudgy hands of the mailman and was thus more or less in danger of being roughed up. More often than not a page would be bent here, a tear found on its cover there. But that would be overshadowed by the mysteries that were waiting within. It came packed chock full of the staff of the Fall TV viewer’s life: the promise of a new Great TV Show. Who knew what was previewed inside? Could be a blurb and photo about something as great as “The Dick Van Dyke Show” or “All in the Family” or “I Love Lucy”…looking at the picture of the fresh-faced cast gave absolutely no indication of the show’s hit factor. You might then, as now, find some well-regarded show-biz name at the top of its cast list, but then 2 or 3 months later that same Big Name might be skulking away with his tail between his legs. And not over to the big screen, either. No sir; back then if you were a TV actor, you generally stayed one. Heaven forbid you think of yourself as Movie Star material. Nope…just look for another opening in that little box and try again. Or go sell insurance or something.

But where I really found gold was in the off-brand channels: 5, 9, 11 and 13. That’s where you found the really good stuff. Sure, you found a rerun here and there of a sitcom, but watching a rerun of “I Love Lucy” 45 years ago is no different from watching it now, as good as that show was. And these days, what you find on channels 1-800 are those same reruns, the 287th showing of National Lampoon’s Vacation, a reality show about every conceivable thing relating to human beings and their foibles, including a recent one about vomiting (the ‘pitch’ meeting must have been brilliant), ‘news’ shows with four panelists all offering their erudite and educated commentary on an important and life-altering aspect of the ‘Jon & Kate Plus 8’divorce and, of course, shows about real crimes committed by people who brutally murdered their spouses because they couldn’t wait to get their hands on that $25,000 life insurance policy.

But on those odd -numbered channels were delights you can’t find much of now: old horror movies, old comedies and various and sundry other films that AMC just has no time for these days.

I remember a show called “Slapstick Cinema” that, on long and lazy Saturday afternoons showed all short and feature length comedies by every screen comic, famous and otherwise from the very dawn of the motion picture onward. Laurel & Hardy, The Three Stooges and Abbott & Costello, sure. But also regularly presented were The Marx Brothers, WC Fields, The Bowery Boys, Charley Chase and others. Some you had to develop a taste for. A true Three Stooges connoisseur might find the humor of old WC a trifle dry, his subtle but pungent one-liners escaping their underdeveloped wit receptors. But if they gamely stuck with Fields for two movies, let’s say, he would often slam their comic sensibilities into high gear by the third. I know it happened to me.

There may have even been more horror movies on TV than comedies, though. Creature Features, Friday Night Frights among many others plied us with a steady diet of thrillers and scared us out of our wits until we couldn’t take it any more and switched over to another channel and “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” There we’d get some relief with a sort of hybrid; mostly comedy with a bit of horror mixed in.

The horror masters- of -ceremony like Zacherley or Vampira didn’t really do the job for me. I liked my horror movies straight up without an appetizer in cheap, local television style wardrobe. I saw those guys for what they were: one more roadblock, along with commercials, on the way to the movie itself. That’s not to say I didn’t like all local TV hosts. On the contrary, as noted on a previous post about a certain clown, I loved those that knew how to present, then get out of they way of, their featured movies or cartoons. Chuck McCann was great not only because he knew how to present this stuff, but because he was a first-class comic himself and his talent landed him gigs in New York television for years.

But the horror people were just a bit too melodramatic and campy- great for those who love that kind of stuff- just not for me.

The mark of a good late night horror movie though, was nightmare potential. You know what I mean; you watch, even though you know you probably shouldn’t, until the point of no return. Once you’ve crossed that line, it’s all over. Those images are indelibly stamped on your brain and you run the risk of the Bride of Frankenstein charging into your dreams in the wee hours and hissing and screaming at you as you cower behind a tree in the middle of some fog-laden woods. You don’t forget stuff like that. But it’s like having ‘the right stuff’; You’re an astronaut who gets on that rocket and doesn’t know if he’s coming back to earth but goes anyway. And you’re proud of it!

At midnight in a dank and quiet basement, even a movie like “The House on Haunted Hill” (the original) will have an iron grip on your senses even if (in pre- CGI times) one of the ghosts looks like someone took a discount store skeleton and moved it by hand across the screen going: ‘Ooooooooohhhhhhhhh’. It makes no difference. If you’re afraid to come out of the cellar into a dark house where everyone’s asleep, you’re movie watching experience has been a resounding success.

Now, you’ll be lucky if you run across even “Halloween VI” any time other than October. And ‘old’ comedies are those made prior to 1990.

How is it that you can surf hundreds of channels and the scariest thing you’ll come across is yet another Chef Competition where they’re each given a can of beans, one clove of garlic, half a stalk of celery and a pumpkin seed and told to make a six course meal in 30 minutes?

I certainly won’t lose any sleep over it!