Stealing is bad yo

My wife and I had only been married for a few months when this scenario played out.  

We were at the grocery store, doing newlywed grocery shopping things (which entails walking around the grocery store while holding hands and discussing the virtues of every product that goes in the cart).  In our cart, among everything else, were two packages of stewing beef that I wanted to use to make supper and a Corningwear dish with a lid that My Lovely Wife wanted.

We get to the checkout and the cashier is running our items over the scanner, and she picks up one of the two packages of stew beef and she runs them over the scanner and it beeps.  Then she gets distracted.  She puts the package that she just ran though down on top of the one she didn't.  She gets out a plastic bag and she puts both packages in the bag.  Instant adrenaline rush.  I'm getting a free package of stew beef!  This is going to be the most delicious beef stew ever made because it will be illicit beef stew.

The cashier puts the bag down and reaches for the next item.  I can hardly believe that this is going to happen.  We were living on just my salary while My Lovely Wife went to school and this meant that we'd have a few extra dollars to maybe do something fun later!  My heart is pounding so loudly that I almost don't hear My Lovely Wife - the woman that I have chosen to spend the rest of my life with - say "Oh, there were two packages there, you only scanned in one."

Instant defeat. 

She had turned me in and killed my attempt to save money.  And it's not like I could be mad at her, since all she did was be an honest person.  I was the bad guy in this scenario.  I was the guy that had decided to turn his back on morals and all the values that I had been raised with.  I wasn't trying to get a good deal.  I was trying to steal, and My Lovely Wife stopped me from committing this heinous act and I was angry because I'd been caught.  Sort of.  Okay, not really caught stealing, more like inadvertently shamed for not doing something that nobody else knew at the time that I knew was going on.  

While all this was going on my head and I tried to keep the emotions off of my face, I almost failed to notice that the dish and lid that she had picked up were in the hands of the cashier.  Here's the deal about the dish and lid: They were sold separately.  The lid had a bar code on it and there was one on the bottom of the dish too.  My Lovely Wife had stuck the lid on the dish earlier, so the cashier opened it up to make sure there was nothing inside it (because that's something a dishonest person would do), then scanned the lid and put both items in the bag.

My first thought was "well, that would have been nice to score too," as I waited for something to be said. And waited.  And waited.  Maybe she missed it?  Or maybe she was waiting for me to say something?  Was she waiting for me to say something and prove that I was the man that she thought I was when she agreed to marry me?  Was this a test?  This had to be a test.

I looked over and I could just see the barest hint of a smile on her face.

The rest of this story has been redacted because we are parents now and we obviously learned a valuable lesson about honesty and integrity.  Mommy and Daddy love each other very much and definitely didn't have a fight over how we could have had free beef stew in her free dish.

We still hold hands when we walk through the store, but I no longer have to discuss every product that goes in the cart.  Also, we cannot testify against each other, so that's nice.

Comments

  1. The dish and lid were sold separately? That's some kind of messed up bullcrap, right there. Maybe the cashier wasn't being forgetful. Maybe she was waging protest in your favour against the fascism of the cookware industry (oh, it's real).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The cookware industry is not what it used to be, that's for sure.

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