Not About the Cat for Once

I went to the salad bar at the supermarket yesterday and a woman was standing at it in a kind of catatonic trance. I went up—everything seemed OK, nice fresh bins of salad stuff just glowing there—and she turned and told me there were no tongs. She'd told them and they said they would bring tongs. I looked around—no tongs approaching in the distance—and settled down to wait.

A minute went by. Another. Employees ambled about in a dreamlike slow motion. One woman fiddled with the hot food bar, but at least addressed us. The person who was supposed to do the salad bar tongs called in sick. The backup called in sick. (OK, I thought, there's nobody in the building for whom tong-bringing is in their job description.) But they had delegated someone to bring the tongs. Ah! Perfect.

More waiting. Finally, away at the horizon, I saw a big rack roll through a door. It slowly approached. A young woman was pushing it in that same sort of trance that I assume all the employees are trained in before they're allowed out on the floor. She came closer and closer and finally she was there. On a middle rack was a big bucket with lots and lots of nice clean tongs.

She slowly, deliberately put out the tongs and slowly, deliberately ignored the waiting woman and me. I've notice a marked deapologization trend in our culture, which makes me feel old. If I saw two people standing there, having waited four or five minutes for tongs, I'd have made a chipper little apology, but I guess that's me. She just kept putting out tongs, and the only recognition of our existence was that she didn't actually bump into us in the course of tong outputting. "Thank you," I said. Nothing.

I thought about this, and decided that to this young woman, customers were objects. They were objects with desires, of course, but a subway turnstile is an object with a desire too. You put in your ticket, and it takes the ticket, and it might even be equipped to say "Thank you," but you wouldn't say "You're welcome" back, would you? There'd be no point. So I just started to get my salad. But I was faintly concerned. I think most of us know that there's an election going on here in the United States, with lots of talk about competing in the new global marketplace. I was just wondering how ready we really are to compete in the global marketplace if we're having this much trouble just putting out tongs.