It Gets Better...

I was in the grocery store the other day when this older lady cut in front of me as only old people can: She played the "I can barely see and stand up straight" card as she walked right in front of me and put her stuff on the belt. Then she turned around and gave me the, "Oh I'm sorry, I didn't know you were in line" look. I let it slide because she was old and I plan to do the same thing when I get to her age.

Her stuff came up to 60 bucks and after swiping her EBT card she still had a balance of 20 bucks. The ghetto cashier was very unsympathetic as she told the lady that she still owed her money. The lady kept saying "But my money goes in on the fourth and today is the seventh." The unsympathetic cashier told her that she has nothing to do with that and that she needed twenty dollars. The lady opened her purse and counted out three dollars and told the girl that it was all she had. Being tactless, the girl said, "You still need 17 dollars."

While the cashier went to get the manager to cancel the order, I looked over the lady's purchases. She had a case of Oodles of Noodles, another case of Cup o' Noodle soup, tuna fish and bread. I think the most expensive thing may have been some Tylenol and Alka Seltzer. I don't know what else was in her cart to come up to 60 dollars but the stuff I saw triggered a flashback.

A long time ago in a state far far away...

POVERTY WARS

Unemployment Strikes Back

Shortly after getting married during our senior year of college, my wife and I had a string of bad financial luck. The school canceled her financial aid a week before classes due to a computer error. I used my savings to pay her tuition for the year so she could finish on time with the mentality that "that's what savings are for, right?" Wrong. A week later our car caught fire and I had no way to get to work so I lost my job. It just so happens that her part time job cut her hours too so we were barely getting enough to pay our $400 a month rent.

We couldn't afford for both of us to catch the bus to school, so I got her a monthly bus pass while I walked the five miles to and from school everyday...walking down the highway to avoid the trek through the "gangland" projects. Even with that, we still only had enough to buy ten dollars worth of groceries every week. We applied for food stamps but were told that because I didn't work at all and she didn't have a consistent 20 hours per week we didn't qualify. So being too poor to even get food stamps, we had to make due with $10 a week for groceries.

We ate a lot of oodles of noodles, cup o noodle soups and jelly sandwiches. You know you're poor when you make meals with oodles of noodles. My favorite was oodles of noodles stir fried with onions, bell peppers, lunch meat and soy sauce. You haven't been poor until you've pretended not to be hungry so that the other person can have double portions of a 10 cent pack of ramen noodles.

Things got worse before they got better, but the point of this blog is...they got better. I'm now in a place where I don't have to eat ramen noodles and I can afford to shop in the grocery store on the expensive side of town. I can afford to buy whatever I want from the store and more importantly, I can afford to hand a cashier twenty bucks to pay for a woman's groceries who is in the same position that I was in not too long ago.

So as the lady told me thank you, the cashier asked "are you f'ing serious?" and the manager said, "God will bless you for it," I simply responded, "He already has. Take care ma'am."