So I’m at the grocery store the other night, buying bananas, Cap’n Crunch, chocolate milk, cranberry juice, and condoms. Cashiers are usually intuitive enough to glean a few things about you from your purchases; in my case that I have kids, that I don’t want any more, and that I have a urinary tract infection (or am simply concerned about getting enough antioxidants and potassium). Or, possibly, that I’m gay and lonely. Truth be told, it’s a little of both.

Anyway, I’m in the express lane, and there are three people behind me. As I’m paying for my meager purchases, a svelte, well-dressed woman of about 45 or so walks up to the front of the line and, even as my cashier is ringing up my items, interrupts to ask him a question. “Where are the paper plates?” she asks. It’s as if the three people behind me and I don’t even exist. The woman is wearing expensive sunglasses (inside on a cloudy day) that make her look like she’s either dodging the paparazzi or hiding the fact that her husband takes a pop at her every once in a while.

My cashier, a young African-American man no older than 20 (probably a student at George Mason University down the street), snaps out of his conveyor-belt induced coma and stares at the woman, uncomprehendingly, for a second or two, before telling her that the paper plates are in aisle three. He gives me a “what can you do?” look before returning to robotically running my items over the scanner.

The lady, however, doesn’t move. It’s as if the young man hasn’t said a word. “And the ketchup?” she asks. “Where is the ketchup?” She asks the question in a terse manner, as if she’s already asked it twice. The cashier gives me an apologetic glance. I look back at him with a look that I hope conveys that I too have worked in a grocery store and know how annoying some customers can be. It’s a hard look to master, involving many facial tics and muscle twitches that could easily be mistaken for epilepsy. But I think this cashier gets me. I’ve been there man, my look says. I'm with you.

“Aisle four,” he says. At this point, he and I are both thinking the same thing. Fine, you don’t know where the paper plates are. That’s not an easy one. Sometimes they put them with other paper products such as paper towels. Other times they put them near the plastic bags and Saran Wrap. In the case of this store, paper plates and plastic utensils are, for whatever reason, right near the spices in the baking aisle. If she was guilty of anything with that question, it was merely interrupting a cashier in the midst of his duties.

But ketchup? In every grocery store, there is always a large, easily recognizable condiments aisle – mustard, Tabasco, salad dressing…they’re all in the same place. Doesn’t everyone know that? Not only that, but ketchup is the most popular condiment in the United States. There are large signs hanging in every aisle that tell you what items you’ll find there – the one hanging over aisle four doesn’t merely say condiments, it actually says KETCHUP in big friendly, easy-to-read letters. Maybe her gigantic sunglasses make it hard for her to read. Hell, these shades are so dark, maybe she thinks she’s blind. Perhaps I should take her glasses off – it would be like the Douglas Adams line about a man who spends years thinking he's blind only to discover he's wearing too big a hat.

Oh, but we weren’t done.

“And the cheese?” she asks. Now the cashier just stops altogether. He looks at me. It’s a look that says, is she kidding? Are we on some sort of reality show? How in the name of Sam Walton can you not know where the fucking cheese is?

“It’s in the dairy aisle,” says the cashier, in the same voice I use to answer my daughter the 400th time she asks me “Why?”

“Where’s that?” asks the lady. There is a noticeable tittering in the line behind me. It’s as if we’re witnessing something historic. That we will remember this moment for the rest of our lives. We’ll all tell our spouses and our children and our coworkers about the day we went to Safeway for a few small things – cereal, granola bars, milk, juice, bananas to sodomize; you know, the simple things – and found ourselves face to face with the Bug-Eyed Lady Who Didn’t Know How the Grocery Store Works. It will be a bestselling novel, then a movie. There will be t-shirts.

Our cashier doesn’t know what number the dairy aisle is, because he’s never had to know. Saying “dairy aisle” usually does it. It’s the aisle with all the fucking dairy in it, that’s what aisle it is. He is very good natured, though. He smiles, and calls a coworker. “Mike,” he grins, “would you show this lady where the cheese is?” Mike stares as if the question were asked in Mandarin. Mike is VERY sure he is being toyed with, but he doesn’t quite know how.

“Okay…” he says. Mike and the lady walk away and that is the last we see of her. I envision her still standing there to this day, like that scene in Borat, relentlessly inquiring about the cheese until Mike finally loses it and starts bludgeoning her to death with a block of Velveeta. “HERE’S YOUR CHEESE YOU MORON! EAT IT! EAT IT YOU BUG-EYED FREAK!”

She walks away and our group lets out a collective exhale. The moment is over. Our cashier did not do what any normal person would have done, which is smack this woman with the plastic grocery divider and slit her throat with a shard of her own sunglasses. He is to be commended for that.