Always Chris

Cashiers From Hell!

I used to live in Cologne, West Germany; It was generally a very pleasant experience, aside from something which happened without fail each and every time I visited the supermarket. At first I thought, It’s got to be me, surely this can’t be everywhere like the plague, surely this cannot be as bad as all that… but then, investigating the conspiracy more deeply–by now I was sure that was what it was–I was horrified to find that it was wide-spread, affecting as much as three in five unfortunate people who passed through the check-out!

It’s much worse than I thought! I thought. This is truly the stuff of the worst crimes against mankind! (Looking back it probably wasn’t quite that bad.)

And yes, at first I decided it was because I was an Auslander—foreigner—but then, stepping up my covert investigations, and gleaning information from my crack team, I found that had nothing to do with it; simply put, the thing I am talking about seems to be a direct assault on the German public–A method of implementing measured psychological anguish. Control, in other words. The government have eyes everywhere!

This is what I am referring to: every time I went through the till, no matter if I’d seen the cashier before or not, she, or he—both sexes proved to be just as bad as each other—would totally refuse to drop the change into my hand! As if I were an infected leper! I would hold my hand out and they would cleverly avert their eyes, cough, or use some other professionally practiced method to distract me, and then drop the money into a little plastic bowl in the counter! I would then feel like a right berk, having to stand there for five or six long and terrible minutes mucking about, trying to scrape the money out, during which time the cashier would shrug and sigh, along with the people waiting in line behind me!

And they think that teaching overseas is a waste of time. To be fair though, I haven’t actually had anymore luck with British cashiers being any good…