Standing behind a gentleman at the Whole Foods on Seventh Ave. His transaction is taking longer than normal. He’s a small guy, bearded. Geeky comes to mind. He’s nervously fiddling through his front pockets, looking for something. Money I assume. The little Asian girl behind the counter smiles and waits patiently. He’s mumbling as he’s looking, aware there’s a line behind him. I’m annoyed, but quiet.
“As you can imagine, not having enough bags is my worst nightmare,” he tells the girl. She smiles.
For a moment I think that perhaps he’s talking about picking up after his dog. During any given stroll down the street you’ll see some poor fool with a dog kneel down and collect their pup’s poop with a plastic bag. It’s a lovely spectacle capable of rendering the latest supermodel completely unappealing. Perhaps that’s what he meant. But he doesn’t have a dog with him.
Then he turns a bit and I realize he was totally serious. Not having enough bags is definitely his worst nightmare. He’s got one bag on each hand, secured with a rubber band. And indeed, he’s been rifling though his pockets for money as I had thought. What I hadn’t realized was that each bill he was removing was individually wrapped in its own plastic bag. The reason for the delay was he had found an individually wrapped twenty and an individually wrapped one in his pockets, but needed to find another indivdually bagged dollar bill.
While he searched I desperately tried to get the attention of my wife, who was in a nearby aisle. She looked over at me but I was unable to convey the fact that someone with an amazing Obsessive Compulsive Disorder was delaying my purchase of wheat germ.
He finally found the second bill, wrapped in plastic of course, and presented the still-smiling cashier with the three bags. She opened them, placed the bills in the till and rang up the transaction. Which wasn’t complete yet.
“Here’s your change,” she said, offering him some coins.
“Oh, no, that’s okay,” he replied, waving it away.
She offered him the receipt.
“No thanks,” he said.
He moved away from the counter but continued to look through a bag of smaller bags. I have no idea why. As we headed towards the door, he was still engaged in some sort of bag operations, BagOps as they’d be called in the military, but I decided not to stare. In what must have certainly been his second worst nightmare, he dropped the box of whatever it was he had purchased on the floor.
A whimper of an “Oh.”
I didn’t stick around for the conclusion. I wanted to get my wife outside where I could describe what I had just seen, to which her only response was, “Why does he not just buy gloves?”
Brian Sack
I started Banterist in 2003 after this conversation with my cat. It led to all sorts of good things.
When I worked in residential mental health, I met a client with severe OCD who would collect everything that was on the sidewalk in front of her when she went for a walk. She would place each item in a plastic bag, then when she returned to the facility, she would place each bag in the box that was labeled to contain that category. Since she walked every day, and she brought home dozens of items per trip, the floor of her room was soon a maze of boxes. After a lot of bargaining, she allowed the boxes to be housed in metal closets, and some of the categories to be purged at regular intervals. She also agreed to let staff view what she collected and take custody of the partial items of food and the occasional dead bird or animal. Truly, she was a very sweet person. She did know she had a problem, but no medication or behavior modification technique helped her obsession. She also had to arrive at meals in the group dining hall a full hour early to prepare the area–but that is a whole nother story.