The Schedule - Day 1264
Updated: Jun 19
The Schedule Day 1264
6/17/2026 4:32P AST
I am at the grocery store buying V8 juice, spicy. I am looking at the shelf and I hear this guy talking to a woman behind me.
“Have coffee with me,” he said.
She hesitates.
“Can I get an asset protection camera over to zone A3,” voice over the intercom
“You should do it,” he says. “I’ll let you destroy me. I won’t even fight back. Twist the knife. Punch me right in the gullet. I want to see if you can do it. I want to see if you can make me not like you anymore. Or, you could just say no.”
An employee comes around the corner of the aisle with a giant cart full of Hersey’s chocolate syrup. ‘Boys of Summer’ starts playing overhead.
I turn to get a look at these two before this precious cargo inventory separates us in this narrow aisle. She’s beautiful. She’s quiet for a few seconds, torturing him right now. Two rabbits standing there quiet in front of a clover. I know his throat is probably getting a little tense right now, wondering what she is going to do with the knife he handed her.
I decide I am going to try and distract the employee headed this way for a minute. His cargo is going to cause a disruptive wake in the ripples of this pond. I walk down the aisle toward him before he gets too close.
“Hey man, why are the price tags on these shelves so small? I can’t even read some of these things.”
He looks at me for a minute, wondering what he must have done in a previous life to be sentenced in this one to the purgatory of stupid interactions with moronic customers who can’t figure out how to shop without the kind of assistance a mediocre child would not even need if he bothered to try and rub two brain cells together.
“I don’t know man,” he says.
He’s just trying to do his job. He can suck it up. He’s getting paid by the hour. Whether or not this Hersey’s chocolate syrup hits the shelves now or 5 minutes from now, his life is basically unaffected. However, there is a beautiful woman trying figure out whether she is going to have coffee with this guy. So the way I see it, this employee can wait. Only people who don’t care about prices, but only rather the ephemeral experience induced by Hersey’s chocolate, are going to buy this stuff anyway because nobody can read the price tags.
I turn around. They are still talking.
“What is the largest container of Hersey’s chocolate syrup you sell?” I ask.
“This one is pretty big,” he says. He hands me an unnecessarily large container from the rack.
“I need more. I need like a 5 gallon bucket of this stuff. Check in back and see if you have any.”
“We don’t.”
“How do you know? You might.”
“But we don’t.”
“Listen, I shouldn’t be telling you this. Keep it to yourself. I am working undercover for asset protection connected to a very important client who requires large quantities of Hersey’s chocolate syrup for exclusive parties and the orders are sent to grocery stores and then a private messenger service picks them up from the grocery stores and transports them to a discrete location where these parties are hosted. His last shipment never showed up. There might be something in it for you if you help me get to the bottom of this. I can’t tell you who my client is, for obvious reasons. Do you like baseball?”
“Yea.”
“Maybe I can hook you up with some tickets. Do me a favor and check.”
“Ok.”
He walks away and before I can even turn around, those two walk past me. They are walking in the same direction. Her jeans should win an award.
I grab a few more items and head to the self-checkout. Honeycrisp apples. This store has the good ones. Practically flawless.
I exit the store and I am walking to my truck and I see these two in the parking lot. They are standing outside of a car with the hood open.
The beautiful lady with the award winning jeans says, “The battery died. Can you help us?”
“No.”
“We have jumper cables. We just need a battery.”
“You want me to pull out his dick for you too? Sometimes the universe is trying to tell you something.”
I bought 5-year battery from AutoZone that was not cheap. I had to replace it after one year the first time and I had to replace the replacement (and pay for it, for some reason) one and a half years after that. So it isn’t really a 5 year battery. In my truck I have jumper cables, battery charger, portable air compressor, fix-a-flat, AAA and an umbrella. At some point one of those things is going to stop working and then I will call AAA. Hopefully they don’t all fail while I am out in the desert digging a hole for my next project.
I should have asked her if she would like to have coffee with me. Right then and there.
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