I left my Costco shopping cart unattended for just a minute while I ran back down the aisle to get something. When I turned around, two guys in uniforms were standing there, giving my cart suspicious looks.
Did they think some terrorist might have left a bomb in it?
Once when I was working at Los Alamos National Lab we had to evacuate the library because some scientist accidentally left his briefcase behind. What happened to the briefcase? It was taken away by security and blown to smithereens.
At the airport I always keep my carry-on luggage under tight control. I can't let my socks, my digital camera, and the four novels I've brought with me to read on the plane suffer the same fate as that poor scientist's research.
But I didn't know I had to worry about my shopping cart.
As I hurried back to my shopping cart with a jar of salsa in my hand, the one of the uniformed guys glanced up at me and said, "Oh, it's hers." He gave me a nod and the two of them went on their way, pushing their own shopping cart.
Somebody tell me when I started living in dystopia.
I saw them again at the check-out line and got a better look at their uniforms. They were only two firemen picking up groceries, not the Costco bomb squad. Still, I wonder if we'll ever get to the point where unattended shopping carts will be confiscated and destroyed.
I'll put it on my list of novels to write.
2 comments:
This is what we get for living in a state of national surveillance state. It's not as bad as it could be, but it's not exactly good either. It's very convoluted. You want to know when, it's when 9/11 occurred and Americans spazzed and handed their rights over to the government because they trusted their government more than they did terrorists. Maybe a good choice then, but when do we get them back? As I type this, I have to enter two words to convince the site I'm not a robot. What fun.
I'd rather have surveillance than exploding shopping carts.
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