People Annoy Me

I hate going to the store on the day before Thanksgiving, but there's little way to avoid it.

On this ridiculous day, all the men and women who only cook once a year and who therefore do not know their way around the grocery store, emerge from their homes with carefully color-coded, alphabetized spreadsheets documenting every ingredient needed to make their elaborate and probably overly-ambitious meals. It's not long before they realize they shouldn't have alphabetized the list; they should have organized it by department. Because they waste gobs of time criss-crossing the store and muttering to themselves and calling people on their cell phones and saying things like, "Can you pick up, like, twenty more votives?"

This wouldn't be so bad except this particular type of person possesses an exaggerated sense of entitlement which drives them to believe that they are the only person shopping and that it's okay to stop smack in the middle of an aisle to make their phone calls or to put their untrained eyes to work finding coarse raw sugar, for example, or champagne vinegar. They lack grocery intuition, which allows one to sense that there are others around you who are also trying to complete their shopping and maybe you are taking up too. much. of. the. dang. aisle. I like it best when they're in the produce department and searching for fresh sage, which the produce department always runs out of the day before Thanksgiving. They ream out the produce guy, and then they're back on their phones frantically shrieking, "I need sage! I need sage!" to some unlucky soul.

Yes, people annoy me. But you do not.

Happy Thanksgiving, all.