Apr 28, 2023 3 min read

My life of crime started innocently, much like Jean Valjean in “Les Misérables.” It started with the essentials, with milk instead of bread.

The fictional Valjean served a 19-year prison sentence for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister. Sure, Victor Hugo’s book gets a bit more complicated after that. The book is 1,488 pages. Abridged! In French! Mon Dieu!

My tale begins at the market, too. I wandered around the produce aisle, picking up bags of apples, oranges, radishes, cucumbers, celery and grapes.

When you have a veritable cornucopia of fruits and veggies, the last thing you want to see is the self-checkout Line. One lone cashier handled a long line of customers, but the self-checkout lines were moving much more swiftly – until I got there.

Brace yourself. We’re getting into Old Man Rant territory. Any anti-technological rant makes me feel like Methuselah or Grandpa Simpson, but I can be hip. Is hip still a thing?

At the self-checkout Line, I had to scroll through virtual pages and pages of apples before I found the ones in my basket. Each apple had a pleasing photograph. They were all stacked up in red, green and gold (the picture of the Honeycrisp apples was so vibrant it could have been the centerfold in Orchard magazine).

I lucked out with the bag of oranges. The red mesh bag of navel oranges had a label with a UPC code.

Side note: I find it fascinating that a series of skinny and fat lines mixed together can tell the computer that the item is $1.99 a pound. Don’t get me started on QR codes. They look like those 3D puzzles from the ’80s. If you stare at them long enough, you’ll see a giraffe on the veldt.

But I digress, like I do. I scanned all of the items except one. A half-pint of chocolate milk that I was going to give to my nephew Connor. There were no fat or skinny lines on the bottle. I typed chocolate into the computer and every chocolate thing in the store came up: nuts, raisins, cranberries, cherries, trail mix. Even though I looked like I was coming back from harvest, with all of my fruits and veggies, I was staring down at pictures of Snickers and Milky Way bars. No closer to purchasing the final item in my basket.

I hit cancel and keyed in the word milk into the computer. Nothing came up.

I began flailing my arms around to get the attention of an actual employee of the store, but, as far as I could see, the customers were doing all of the work. Finally, I saw a woman in a green vest and a name badge. I waved toward her, and she turned around and went into the office.

Exasperated, I gave up with a sigh and a few choice curse words. I threw the milk into my bag, paid for everything else and walked out.