new to me

Have you ever been in a public place and you hear someone's voice rise above all ambient noise? Someone speaking loudly, way too loud for the surroundings? Someone who doesn't know how to use their "inside voice?"

As long as I am asking questions.... have you ever encountered an idiot? I mean someone who says something so stupid that it makes you wonder how they make it through an entire day without injury?

Well, I just experienced both of those in Aldi this afternoon. Kind of like a "two-for-one" special.

I was standing in a rather lengthy checkout line in Aldi with under a dozen items in my shopping cart. I was about five or six shoppers back in the line, still a few checked-out orders away from putting my items up on the conveyor belt. Suddenly, a very loud voice bellowed out, filling the front part of the store with tones that rose above and blotted out the piped-in music and quiet conversation among the other customers. I quickly scanned the checkout area and zeroed in on the source of the voice. It was a security guard, all decked out in a very official-looking jacket embellished with official-looking patches representing the contracted security agency which supplied Aldi with fearless protection from baked goods pilferers and parking lot loiterers. His ensemble was capped off with a very official-looking military style hat that sported some kind of shiny badge just above the lacquered brim. He was engaging in conversation  with the customer at the very front of the queue. When I began to hear the actual words he was speaking, rather than just the loud, cacophonous tone of his his voice, this is when I heard....

"I never even heard of them! What are they? Nectarines?!? What are nectarines? I never heard of no nectarines!" I looked to see that he was holding a clear plastic bag filled with nectarines at eye level, examining the contents of the bag as though it contained an alien life form. "What are they anyway?" he continued, "I heard of peaches, but I never heard of no nectarines!"

This fellow was easily in his middle twenties. He could have been thirty. And, according to his booming public confession, he had never crossed paths with a nectarine in his entire existence on earth. He expounded on his doubt that something called "nectarine" was even real. I would say, if the security company that employs this guy goes searching among their ranks for someone to take duty at Fort Knox, they will be recruiting from a different division. I'm not so sure that he was qualified to handle someone shoving a Twix bar in their pocket at the checkout counter.

Oh... but he was not finished. He elaborated on his vast knowledge of the produce world as well as his capacity for dialects, colloquialisms and regional nomenclature.

"Nectarines? Hmmm... Maybe I know them by a different name. Y'know like some people say 'sesame seeds' and some people say 'poppy seeds.'"

It was right then and there that I stopped listening.

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