Self-checkout lanes are a test of love

Want a great test for the strength of your marriage?

Try the self-checkout lanes at your favorite grocery store.

The do-it-yourself checkout option began for those with more confidence than items in their cart, for those stalwart customers who believed they could scan and pay faster on their own than by placing their trust in employees who run registers for a living.

Eventually, when both technology and customers proved capable (and when it became obvious that a UPC scanner, unlike an hourly employee, would never ask for bathroom breaks or cost-of-living increases), employers started replacing traditional checkouts with more DIY stations.

I generally avoid such lanes. If I have to wait in line a few more minutes for a traditional cashier, I rejoice. The break allows me to play on my phone (“Word Cookies” is my current BFF), see whatever Lady Gaga or the Kardashians are up to the covers of various tabloids, or just stare into space, tapping my foot to the elevator-muzak version of “Stairway to Heaven.”

My wife, however, believes differently.

This is where the marriage test comes into play.

She will ask, ever so sweetly, if I really want to wait in line, pointing to the sole open register among twenty-six lanes at our local Big Box Emporium, where an octogenarian customer methodically unloads a year’s worth of mac-and-cheese and Mucinex for the septuagenarian employee who drags each item slowly across the scanner, while somewhere in the distance a dog howls plaintively and grass grows in graveyards.

Wouldn’t it be ever-so-much better, my wife keens, if we used the self-checkout lane? We can be out long before we would even reach the conveyor belt in the traditional lane.

This is a dangerous offer. In the early days of self-checkouts, we naively sojourned there, but my wife’s just-take-charge attitude, coupled with my disdain for criticism, led to serious fights when she accused me of bagging too quickly and I accused her of scanning too slowly. We soon ended up with a cart half-filled with paid and unpaid items (and no idea which half was which) and a flashing light above the register, calling attention to the fact that we were, in fact, too stupid to self-pay.

But this was years ago. Now, we have brokered a certain measure of peace at the self-checkout, mostly because we have learned to specialize. Under our new, assembly-line system, my wife takes items out of the cart, I scan and bag them, and she puts the bags into a second cart, one which we procure solely for the purpose of maintaining our equanimity.

Still, though, I recognize this is a dangerous time for our marriage, and that I’m always just one can of peas or box of corn flakes away from a major meltdown.

So when she asks which line I prefer, I always counter with the same question: “How strong is our marriage today?”

Her answer is always the same: “I think we can do this. I’ll be good.”

I make no such promises, but I usually am. I’d like to believe I’ve matured in the same way DIY technology has.

Some couples go to expensive therapists. Others take part in trust-falls or play the gratitude game or go on long weekend retreats to reconnect. My wife and I just go to Walmart — save money, live better, strengthen your marriage. If that’s not the store’s motto, it should be.

Anyway, in a few years, we’ll be arguing about who has to pick up the groceries on the front porch after the drone has dropped them there.

Thanks to technology, this too shall pass.

This was originally published in The Alliance Review in May 2017. In the five years since, I have become more comfortable with self-checkout lines, to the point of preferring them over lines with a traditional cashier. Go figure. Also, the drone on the porch thing is closer to reality in some places, huh? 

Getting up the gumption to paint

In the name of domestic tranquility, many household tasks at Casa Schillig are left to professionals.

This includes anything that involves measuring, pasting or power tools. My definition of power tools is generous enough to encompass hammers and screwdrivers, so I consequently do very little that qualifies as “handy.” Sure, I’ll slap together “some assembly required” lawn chairs, but my work is so shoddy I don’t trust anybody except my mother-in-law to sit in them.

A few years into the marriage, my wife and I decided it would be better to hire out these jobs than endure the petty arguing that comes from doing them together. I would rather work a second (and even a third) job to pay a professional than subject myself to spousal browbeating for seven hours on a Saturday or accidentally glue shut my mouth — or hers — with wallpaper paste.

Still, every year I pick one task that I can accomplish on my own, just so I can feel manly and join in water-cooler conversations with burly co-workers who routinely knock out walls, thread electrical wire through ceilings, and bench press the foundations of their homes with a cold brew in one hand and the TV remote in the other. (Said bench pressing being accomplished with their teeth, apparently.)

This year’s project was painting the basement floor.

Actually, it was last year’s project too, but I successfully avoided it with no ill effects to my masculinity. My excuse was provided by one of those Hungry-Jack-dinner-eating contractor types who waterproofed our basement in 2009. He told me not to paint the floor until the newly poured concrete had cured, which conjured up images of Ernest Angley slapping some unfortunate upside the head and intoning, “You are healed!” but apparently is something else entirely since Mr. Angley never appeared in my basement. He recommended waiting six months to paint. (The contractor, not the Rev. Angley.)

In my mind, six months really meant a year, which I somehow stretched to almost two years, letting cobwebs build up in the corners while I pretended not to notice.

But last week I could procrastinate no longer, so I broke out the power washer (the only power tool I feel qualified to operate, since it’s really nothing more than a squirt gun made legitimate through a power cord and frequent on-box warnings) and made a big mess in the name of eliminating those cobwebs. Then I bought some paint, rollers and brushes and got to work.

They say the hardest part of painting is the preparation (“they” being the first 100 people in the phonebook), but I bet they’re not referring to mental preparation. Regardless, I wasted a lot of time pacing the basement, sighing and bemoaning my fate. One day, I even ran off to the movies, so I suppose it’s poetic justice or karma that I saw the pretty-rotten “Cowboys and Aliens.” It wouldn’t have been fair to see something good.

When I finally popped the top off the first paint can, I was surprised by how quickly the job went. I strategized successfully, relocating the cats’ litter box and food bowls to the top of the stairs (painting upsets delicate feline ecosystems), moving everything else to the center of the basement and painting the corners. The next day, I moved everything back, minus the litter box, before painting the center of the room.

The hardest part — well, after working up the gumption to start, that is — was painting my way up the steps, which involved a backward spider crawl that would be the envy of any professional contortionist. At one point, I forgot that I had already painted the handrail and used it to steady myself after all the blood rushing to my head (which at many points was lower than the rest of my body) made me dizzy. This gave me a battleship-gray palm but saved me from a potentially life-ending tumble.

I’d like to believe I didn’t kill too many brain cells by breathing in paint fumes for the last few days, and that the job really does look decent. Not professionally decent, mind you, but decent by my own inept standards, which means there isn’t too much paint on the walls and ceiling and that the places I missed are covered up by strategically placed boxes of Christmas decorations.

And even if it’s not, it’s just a basement. The only reason my wife allows me to tinker down there is that nobody except the cats will ever see it anyway, and they’re so grateful to have their litter box back in its rightful place that they won’t complain about the results.


Originally published in 2011