Ping Ping Ping
Posted by Barbanne on June 27, 2002 at 23:38:58:
A story not seen here before I don't think but some may recognise it.
Enjoy
PING PING PING.
(The song of the Checkout Chick)
Ping...........Ping...........Ping...........Ping, endless pings.
I stand behind the scanner.
Picking up groceries and swiping them across my scanner plate.
Gazing at the bland, bored faces of the supermarket anaesthetised as they lift their purchases from their carts and stack them on my black rubber belt. I drive it forward a bit and bring frozen foods within grasp.
Ping.....English toffee ice cream.
Ping.....Frozen baby peas.
Ping.....Chicken biryani, frozen of course.
Ping.....Frozen ravioli ricotta.
The drippy, icy packets are leaving wet rings on my rubber belt and I get out my disgusting rag and wipe it dry.
Ping...........................
"Just a moment please," I say.
I have to polish the glass cover plate of my scanner as it is taking yonks to read anything.
The woman looks at me as if to say, "My life's important, you stupid girl now just do my stuff and save your maintenace chores until I am well away."
I smile with my "fuck you madam," smile.
"Got fly buys?" I ask.
She fumbles in her bag and passes me the blue plastic card. I swipe it and hand it back and say "Thank you," and think, "cunt."
I finish her order it comes to sixty five dollars and thirty two cents rounded down to thirty cents and she passes me her visa card with a motor maker's logo and I say, "how much madam?"
"Make it a hundred," I can see she thinks, "idiot," but doesn't say it.
I smile and push the card into the slot. I ask her to press OK and wait while electronic marvels that go bzzz, bzzzz, bzzzzzz transfer her wealth to the supermarket and then count out her change.
This guy again.
An older bloke with his harrassed looking little wife.
They load up there groceries onto my belt and I start scanning them through. She goes darting off to get some fags from the ciggie counter and he stays and stares at me. "Good morning Kellie," he says reading my name off of my name tag but he doesn't meet my eyes. Oh no, his eyes are firmly fixed where they always are, right on my tits. I wear a white shirt and a black skirt as does every other checkout operator and my flimsy bra is pretty apparent under the thin cotton of my shirt, especially if you concentrate and stare at it.
Which he does.
"How's your day," I ask.
"OK," he mumbles.
His eyes will ignite my shirt front soon.
Ping, ping ping, goes my scanner.
"So what are you doing today?" I ask although I couldn't care less.
"Nuthin' much," he says.
His wife comes back and he glances at her and then pretends to look around as if there is something more interesting than my tits.
There is actually.
Across two aisles from me is Aleisha and she is a BIG girl with a size twenty four D bra which makes my ten double A look like the mole hill it is.
He's looking at her now.
I can't resist a grin.
"Get a life mate," I mutter under my breath.
Their stuff is done and loaded into their trolley and he pays and she says "Goodbye Kellie."
"Byyyyee," I say turning the word into a musical note.
I have to reload the plastic bags onto the wire frame. The bloody things are deliberately made to not quite fit I always think and they are a proper bastard to get on.
There its done.
A woman who looks like a bag lady, overcoat, hair like steel wire, grey and unruly and uncombed for days I reckon and a long Indian cotton dress and farmer's boots. Her trolley is loaded with tins of dog and cat food and obviously puss and woofie eat well and she either starves or joins them.
Ping.....ping......ping.....
I shoot her stuff through and she produces a plastic card to pay.
Wonders will never cease.
I expected old folded bank notes, probably pre decimal and pre historic.
God I get cynical at times.
A young woman who smiles at me without ever meeting my eyes.
I start scanning her stuff.
Frozen, packaged, milk and bread, a shopping load that says single and alone and lonely to me.
I try to engage her eyes and smile a message of solidarity, like "Isn't being alone and unwanted a bummer," but she has disappeared inside herself.
Damn!
A packet of potato roti bread won't scan.
I waggle it at Aleisha but she is engaged.
"Hey 'Leish, roti bread?"
She shakes her head like "nope."
I say to the girl, "Do you remember how much this was?"
She looks at me like I have asked her a mastermind question.
"Never mind," I smile and pick up my mike.
"Bakery price check for register five."
Nothing happens.
I have to repeat my message and then one of the new kids comes over from where he has been stacking shelves. I hold the packet up. He takes it and wanders off. I smile at the girl and mumble, "Sorry, won't be long," and smile hastily at the steadily growing queue extending from my position.
The kid comes back.
"Three dollars sixty five."
I take the packet and punch in the numerical equivalent of the bar code and the price and finish up the girl's order.
The kid from bakery is hanging around, trying to catch my eye.
"Hey Kellie how'd ya go in the footy tipping?"
"Yeah OK," I say and ignore him. He wanders off. He has designs on getting into my pants. I lied to him, my footy tips were shithouse as always.
The next customer is loaded up and pissed off for being kept waiting two seconds.
Two young boys a couple of years younger than me.
Coke, chips, chocolate and other junk. A great diet.
Ping.....ping......ping......
One of them makes a production of reading my name tag.
"Hey Kellie, how'd you like to check me out sometime?"
"Piss off junior," I mutter and then out loud, "Avaniceday boys,"
"She loves me," The jerk says to his mate.
"Byyyyeee," I warble.
Its time for my break.
I put up the closed sign and finish off the last customer.
An ancient, foreign looking dame with whiskers sprouting from warts and things on her surly face pushes her stuff at me.
"Sorry I'm closed."
She stands and stares, her toothless gums puckered viciously.
I sigh and shove her stuff through.
"Are you still open?" a scruffy confused looking guy says, "only this sign says......"
"Yeah, sorry I'm closed," I say. "Just some people can't or won't read."
The old broad ignores me and pays with prehistoric notes.
I eat my stale sandwich and drink my diet coke outside by the bins at the back. My two best friends, Allie and Dannie both smoke and have to take their breaks outside so I forgo the luxury of the laminex lunch room to be with them out here in smoker's purgatory.
We bullshit about our love lives (mine is non existent) and talk about the guys inside.
We giggle a lot and its terrific. Not being out by the smelly garbage and all but just being with two girls I really like a lot. Some senior boys from the college across the road go by dressed for sports and we rate them on our nought to ten scale.
One of them looks really cute although he is probably a year younger than me and I dwell my eyes on the front of his shorts and wonder if he'd like an older woman.
Ah well its time to go back.
I'm off the checkout on account of the afternoon is slow and take to stacking shelves.
While I am doing that the manager comes and tells me I'll be on midnight to eight am next week.
Wow, my favourite way to spend a night is to be sitting behind a scanner and a cash register catering to the night owls and wierdos of the city.
I go into the store room and stock up on weeties and wheel out a little trolley full and start repleneshing the cereals shelf.
The rush to get in and stock up before going home hour.
I'm on the fast service checkout. Twelve items or less. No matter how fast I shove stuff through and scan, no matter that my scanner is ping, pinging almost continuously, still I can hear the complaints.
"You'd think they'd have more than one open."
"Would have to be the slowest girl they've got." (which I am not)
"I thought this was supposed to be the fast lane."
Maybe if every second person wasn't cheating by bringing through thirteen or fourteen items and maybe if the rush wasn't always at tea time when half of the others were on their break, and maybe if competiton policy hadn't caused the chain to reduce casuals by half, maybe then they could waltz through the way they thought they should be able to.
The kid is revolting.
Twisting and turning in his ride on shopping cart and howling and doing some sort of contortions and making it impossible for his mother to reach the stuff in the trolley.
I push them through as she hands them up.
The muttering in the queue starts to reach revolutionary levels.
I look beseechingly at Karenne but since she became supervisor there is no way she will operate a checkout even if she does know it backward. She looks around self importantly and makes announcements calling for extra girls. They will be out of earshot no worries about that, I know I am whenever its my break and the call to arms comes.
Allie shows up and opens one of the other fast service lanes.
I look like "Thank you Allie friend."
The kid is still writhing and screaming.
"Isn't he the naughty little boy," I say.
"Oh he's adorable aren't you Jason?"
He shrieks at the top of his range and mum wheels him away.
"Next please," I say.
I know what you are going to say, you are going to say I am sad.
And you'd be right. Actually I am pathetic but there I was, later that night, on my awful, cracked old vinyl lounge with the kid from the supermarket. I accepted a ride home from work in his ancient Datsun Sunny and then I weakened and asked him in and now we are grappling on this ghastly broken lounge in the living room of my tiny flat.
He is realising half of his dreams.
He has his hand inside my pants.
My bra is hanging loose down inside my top somewhere and he has fondled my tits and now I let him get my skirt unzipped and he has his hand inside the waistband of my cheap cotton panties and his finger is inside my pussy. I have love bites on my neck where he has nuzzled and nibbled me earlier and I just know they will go red and obvious and I'll have to explain that to Allie and Dannie.
We are groping and pashing and he must have gotten lucky because his finger has found the spot and I am moaning and panting and he says, "Wanna fuck, eh Kellie, let me put it in, oh Kellie I love you I really love you."
"Yeah Tod, his name is Tod, "I love you too."
I don't and I don't intend to let this creep impregnate me and I am really wondering how I have let it all get this far.
He manages to make me come and I feel good about that and after I finish spasming I unzip his pants and find his cock is hugely erect and I am surprised I have to admit at how big it is. I pull him off and he shoots his load onto my hand and into his underpants.
I reckon that's enough for the night and disengage myself and he just lies there with his cock declining and receding and says "Oh Kellie, oh babe I really love you, lets do it for real, lets make love."
"Tod we can't. I gotta be careful."
I fiddle my bra back onto my tits and clip it up.
As I am readjusting my panties and zipping my skirt closed he says, "Oh Kellie I have loved you from the first time we met."
Yeah, I think, you've loved my pussy and now you've found out it works you want to test drive it.
I say, "Tod lets keep something for later we can do this again."
"Let's go to the pictures Kellie, hey! This weekend?"
"Sure, I'll let you know."
"Then we can come back here and...................."
"Yeah Tod."
This is getting way out of hand.
He is all over me again and I feel him nibbling my neck again.
"Tod," I say, "Its time to go."
He sighs and goes "Oh, OK then."
We get up and he zips his pants and I kiss him a couple times more and show him out.
Why did I do that?
WHY?
I'm on nights.
We open at midnight and a smattering of lost souls and shift workers came in and wander about like zombies in "Night of the Living Dead."
Ping, ping ping......
I scan the purchases of the living dead and pack them into those cheap plastic bags. Almost nobody brings a bag of their own or buys one of our cotton, ecologically responsible bags.
Enough plastic leaves here every week to build a million Japanese cars.
Well, something like that.
A creepozoid woman with hollow eyes and black painted lips has been standing shiftily around by the confectionery stands and because we are almost empty I notice her and pin her as a junkie who probably needs sustenance. I hate people like that.
She is maybe thirty and is wearing a long overcoat and looks ravaged and wasted.
I put the only other customer, a tried looking cabbie through, and he carries his stuff out to where his cab is parked in the baby bays.
The creepozoid comes over.
I can't see that she has anything and start to get a bad feeling.
"Can I help you," I say.
She is standing there at the end of the race looking stunned.
She pulls out a needle filled with something red that I take it is blood.
"Want aids Kellie?" she reads my tag. "No, then give me all of your money."
"Sure, sure," I say, "just stay cool, you can have it."
I hit the night alarm and it clatters throughout the store.
"Bitch!!!!!," she screams and lunges at me but I am over the rail and sprinting back towards the night manager's office.
The woman looks confused and tries to get at the till but it is locked and after a few fumbles she runs outside, dropping her hypo as she goes.
I run into the night manager a young woman called Gabrielle and splutter out my story. She calms me down and we go back and look at where the woman has done a runner and then she calls the cops.
A couple more customers have wandered in but she says, "Sorry we're closed we've had a burglary."
I say, "I can look after them Gabrielle."
She says, "Are you sure Kellie?"
I say "Yeah," and move to another checkout.
The cops arrive and Gabrielle shows them the needle and all and then the store manager arrives on account of Gabrielle called him and he takes me into a back room while Gabrielle deals with the customers and a closed sign is hung outside and the cops put up crime scene tape while they dust my register and stuff.
The cops come and get my story and then the manager drives me home.
They put me on the midday to eight pm shift for the end of the week because we stay open until seven and then by the time we clean up and restock and stuff its eight o'clock.
I get the same droobs and the same squalling kids and the same surly people and the same sad anaesthetised faces.
It's a job but it's a bore.
For a girl who was planning on writing a novel and getting rich and then meeting the man of her dreams and getting married and having a lovely little girl and a loveable little boy and then maybe another scamp of a girl, its a big disappointment.
My whole life is a disappointment and really sucks.
So, when I turn down Tod's offer of a ride one night, (he is definitely not the man of my dreams) and walk home alone through the park and the guy the papers have dubbed the night time strangler catches me and beats me up and then rapes me and strangles me and rapes me again, its a relief to get killed.
As I die I can imagine Allie and Dannie and Aleisha and Gabrielle and Tod and the other guys talking in hushed thrilled tones about how my body was found with my panties around my ankles and my dress scrunched up and the killer's semen still on and in me and my eyes bugged open and my tongue dragging out and they will get off on the awful thrill of knowing someone who is now famously dead.
I wonder as my mind goes black will any of them say well, the most notable thing Kellie ever did was to get naked and dead and make the news for one whole evening.
The very last thing I hear in life is an echoing ping.....ping.....ping.