Oh, Bennie.

Location: Garden Ridge’s incredibly long and irritating check-out lane where we started off being 10th in a line with only one cashier open and where people were getting very frustrated. Well, mostly just Hubbit.

The valiant 20-something-vertically-challenged-likely-Puerto-Rican-cashier, Bennie, dances onto the scene, hoping to save the sanity of the sole cashier chick who is scanning far too slowly to satisfy anyone. Well, mostly just Hubbit.

Bennie the Cashier: I can take the next person down here.
Hubbit: THANK God. (huffs and puffs as he pulls our cart up to Bennie’s counter
Bennie the Cashier: Oh, wait. I’ll be just a minute.

Bennie leaves the counter to straighten up some nearby merchandise that apparently just couldn’t wait to be rearranged. The entire time, Hubbit is looking from the slow cashier’s lane to Bennie, realizing if he’d not been “the next customer” Bennie had called for, he would have already been finished paying and out the door. However, due to his amazing maturity and class (happy meds…cough, cough) he waits as patiently as he’s capable of waiting patiently, which is not really all that patiently, to be quite honest.

About three-customers-through-the-slow-chick’s-land-later, Bennie finishes arranging the merchandise and dashes back to the register, with a smile.

Bennie the Cashier: Ok, I’m back!
Hubbit: awesome. (spoken with enthusiasm deserving only a lowercase "a")
Bennie the Cashier: Oh, wait! I have to change the register receipt paper. Hold on. (starts pushing things around under the register, to get the needed paper)
Hubbit: Are you flippin’ kidding me?! (looks at me, looks at the other slow cashier chick’s line flowing smoothly, looks at Bennie, still trying to stay patient)
Bennie the Cashier: All done! Here we go!
Hubbit: Great. (sighs...exhausted from the incredible effort it takes a man of his level of impatience to stay calm in a ridiculous situation such as this)

Hubbit is emotionally defeated from staying calm and collected during Bennie's shenanigans, wondering silently if he's the subject of the new and improved Candid Camera show I'm always talking about trying to make a homemade version of. (Side note: Surely, I'm not the ONLY person in the world who makes mental lists of situations which would make EPIC new episodes for its reprise on television, right?!)

The items are rang up and paid for, Hubbit has one foot turned toward the door to leave and Bennie the Cashier is handing Hubbit’s debit card back to him…

Bennie the Cashier: What are you? ‘Bout 305?
Hubbit: (realizes Bennie has just made an attempt to guess his weight and remains visibly unfazed after the entirely unusual exchange has led him to think ANYTHING can happen at Garden Ridge at this point) Um, something like that.

Good Lord, Bennie.

Leaving the store…

Me: (laughing hysterically) Who does that?!
Hubbit: I think he was a little "unique", honey.
Me: But, I mean…he was pretty darn accurate. How do people learn to do that?!
Hubbit: I don’t know. Maybe he is training to be one of those carnival guys who guess your weight. I can see him with a mic in his hand saying, Come on down!
Me: Yeah, I don’t get it. You pay those guys $5 to make you feel fat or old. And, they’re NEVER wrong. Nope. Because if they are, they have to surrender one of those horrible-hard-and-never-IT’S SO FLUFFY-stuffed-animals AND Heaven knows if they give away too many of those, they’re on their way out the Carnie door…
Hubbit: …and apparently working at Garden Ridge.

Right-on.

The big bonus of the experience was that Bug was shopping with us and went around for the rest of the day trying to guess MY weight, saying:

What are you, Mom? ‘Bout 130?

Nice.

Whitney

"Carnies built this country, the carnival part of it anyway." (Homer Simpson)