Only the Desperate...

What would possess someone to take three children, ages 6, 4, and 1, load them into the car, and actually take them inside an actual place of business? DESPERATION! On Monday (3 June 2008) I had to take get a prescription filled and Scott was gone overnight for work. So I girded up my loins and was optimistic the promise of pizza for dinner would be an incentive for improved behavior from previous trips to the store on a desperate mission. Since I had to endure the experience anyway, I decided I might be able to sweeten the deal by making use of a coupon for a free $25 gift card with a new prescription refill. After picking up Oakley from school, we headed to the nearest Shop Ko. After the five minute unloading process and a reminder of great rewards that awaited the obedient child, we headed inside the store. As I presented to prescription and coupon to the pharmacy employee, all seemed to be going well until I was told this coupon was only good for a patient who had not filled a prescription at their pharmacy before. The temptation of the $25 gift card was too much. I foolishly said we’d have the prescription filled at their other location just a few miles away. Oh, what then seemed like just a few miles and a few more minutes was definitely not worth the $25 or any multiple of that amount for what would then occur.

We repeated the process of handing the pharmacy employee our prescription and coupon. She smiled kindly with this look of “You poor, poor woman – having to take all three of those boys to the store” and told us it should just be about ten minutes. Music to my ears! I figured I could keep them entertained for that long. Who was I kidding?!?! The next ten minutes included shouting matches between Oakley and Eli over whose turn it was to have their blood pressure checked at the pharmacy's machine; all 30 walking canes being taken down and strewn all over the pharmacy, being used as swords for duals with both the willing and unwilling participant; each humidifier taken off the shelf and checked out for it’s amazing features; and multiple drug remedies tested for their aerodynamic abilities.

I’m sure as quickly as was humanly possible, the prescription was ready and the technician rang us up, handed us our bad, and said, “Have a nice night,” with this look in her eyes like “Yea right, like that will happen with your wild Indians.” Because I don’t usually shop at Shop Ko and knew I would place the gift card in my wallet and forget about it for years, I decided we’d pick up a few flats of flowers and be on our way. We needed the flowers and there was a register outside in the garden area to pay for purchases. Again, in my faulty thinking, I thought, “at least we’ll be outside, what more damage could be done?” I was about to find out. Eli helped me pick out the colors of flowers he liked while Asher immediately picked out the mud puddles he liked. Oakley wanted to “play store” and was pushing trying to climb behind the register. I started looking around for the clerk as a gray-haired couple found great entertainment watching how quickly Asher was covered in mud, Eli was running around adding all kinds of flowers to the cart as I kept telling him “We don’t need any more flowers” and he kept saying, “But I love this one, too!”, and Oakley kept insisting he could be the clerk and I could pay him for the flowers. I finally found the teenage boy who was working in the Garden Center and asked him if I could pay for my flowers, thinking the Finish Line was in sight. By this time other customers were lined up to pay for their purchases, including the completely entertained Grandpa and Grandma. After he totaled up the plants, I handed him the gift card and he got this “deer-in-the-headlights” look on his face, and started pushing a lot of buttons and sliding the card multiple times, all to no avail. He made numerous phone calls to employees in the store trying to figure out what to do. All along, the mud and water continued accumulate on Asher, Eli continued to bring in flowers that he knew we just had to have, and Oakley kept saying he knew how to make the register work. This went on for at least five more minutes, which is an extraordinarily long amount of time in this circumstance, and the young man said, “I’m sorry I can’t get it to work. I think the computers must be down. You’ll have to take your purchases inside to pay for them.” I put on my most gracious smile and said, “Here is the gift card with $25 on it and here is more than enough cash to cover the difference. When your computer is back up, you can ring them up and pay for them then.” I placed my card and money on the counter and the flowers in my basket, scooped up my mud-covered one-year-old, called for my four and six-year old to follow me to the car, smiled at the older couple who were chuckling at my performance with the incompetent clerk and was on my way home finally! On the way home I wondered how old that young man would be and how many children it would take for him to finally understand my actions that day.