Cockeysville is roughly the midpoint of the trip from my house to my mom's house, and is also the location of one of my grandmother's domiciles some time ago (a fact I repeat only because my mother feels compelled to repeat it everytime she hears the word “Cockeysville,” or sometimes even the word “Maryland”). Jenn and I stopped there this morning on our way up to my mom's house for the holiday in our ongoing attempt to find something substantive to eat. Word to the weary I-83 traveler: those ads touting late-night drive-thru for Wendy's apparently don't apply to any of the franchises along this corridor.
What we did find in Cockeysville was a 7-11. So, deciding that this was our last, best hope for anything to consume before the second half of the drive, we stopped and purchased some consumables. We were rung up by a fellow who, had it been October 31 I would have assumed was already dressed for a costume party he'd be attending immediately after his shift, dressed remarkably like Michael Moore. But this wasn't a costume. This was just what this guy was.
He plodded through the ringing up procedure (even the beeps coming out of the register seemed a little slow) and all went smoothly until I presented four six-packs of the one-calorie Coke product C2. They were having a remarkable (probably close-out) special: a six of C2 for 99¢. He rang up a pair of 12-pack Coke products for something like $4.39 each, which we immediately disputed using the bright orange “99¢” pasted to each six-pack as evidence.
Michael Moore then proceeded to cancel out every item we had (more plodding beeping), then rung the whole order up again. When he finished the last item (manually typing in the price for the six packs), he says, “Okay, that will be...” and glances at the register display, which I could also see. It read “-$17.35.” Said Michael, in an uncanny impression of Strong Sad, “Oh, you have to be kidding me.” Despite myself, I laughed, then felt immediately bad for this lump. He pressed a few more buttons that ultimately produced the opening of the cash drawer. Was he, I wondered, going to take $17.35 out of the drawer just to keep the drawer even? I'm not sure exactly what the drawer-opening accomplished, nor Michael Moore's subsequent blankly staring at it for a moment, but the drawer was soon closed once again.
He beeped his way once again through our selections, and I felt the need to say something to assuage my guilt over having laughed at this poor schmoe right to his face, so I go, “Well, at least it's not Christmas Eve.” That was the best I could come up with. Michael Moore/Strong Sad replied, “Yeah, I'm not feeling really good.”
We finally arrived at the end of the beeping, and a more reasonable total of around $15. I have no idea if this was even correct, but it seemed appropriate to let this transaction end in the realm of “close enough”. Jenn and I left the store and sat in the car munching away at our purchases before we got back on the road, and watched this guy wander around the store while we did so. Jenn noted the presence of an older woman (in her 60's, most likely) in the car to our right, just sitting there, also watching Michael Moore shuffle around the store. Michael Moore walked over to the soda fountain and got a mixture of ice, Orange Slice and Sprite, drank it, then wandered back behind the counter. Jenn surmised that this woman-in-waiting may have been his mom, which added yet another level of pathos to this whole experience. Young, sad Michael Moore-esque character has his mom waiting outside the parking lot at 1:00 in the morning Thanksgiving Day waiting for, we supposed, his shift to finish.
Some sort of affiliation between these two was confirmed when Michael Moore came out of the store with a book that he gave to the woman in the car. They talked for a few minutes, then Michael Moore shuffled back into the 7-11, and Mrs. Moore continued her vigil in the car, and the three of us resumed our watching of the dude in the store. I observed at this point, “This is probably the most famous this guy will ever be.”
At this point, a guy drove up to the store, an older gentleman, dressed in a gray suit, thick glasses (through which he peered at me unnervingly as he pulled in) and white sneakers. He walked in to begin his own adventure. But the time for our dawdling had come to an end, and we departed the Cockeysville 7-11 parking lot not knowing how the suit-and-sneakers guy's adventure ended, and not discovering the connection between Michael Moore and the Woman Who Received the Book.
But I did get a blog entry out of it. And a case of C2 for $4. I should probably send this entry to the Cockeysville Board of Tourism for their next ad campaign.
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