Occupational History & Morality

Friday is often an errand-running day for me. I have no obligations but a large block of online writing tutoring in the late afternoon/evening hours, so tend to make my usual trips: to the bicycle store, to purchase my weekly supply of inner tubes (excessive, but still cheaper than car payments!); to the bank, to deposit my bi-weekly paycheck (my direct deposit, may, in fact, never start to work); to the grocery store to buy some non-perishable goods to get me through the weekend (chick-peas, hot sauce, Kashi 7-grain pilaf); and to the liquor store to pick up some kind of booze-object for the night's socializing (ended up taking a 6-er of Xingu, which was well-received, but consumed altogether too quickly, due to its immediate popularity).

At Publix, the grocery store, yesterday, I also needed to get some cash-back with my purchase, to make sure I had some cash on-hand for the aforementioned social gathering, which was also going to involve the ordering of several pizzas (and incidentally, the social gathering was pretty much exactly the kind of thing that I had in mind when I was thinking of the reasons of why to go to graduate school for writing in the first place: it was about a dozen MFAers+significant others (my significant other was a flask of bourbon ("brownest of the brown liquors")), each of whom had brought a piece of writing by a favorite author to read out loud to the group. It was actually a really incredible read-around - diverse tastes, lots of why energy, extremely interesting poems, stories, essays, or sundry other bits of prose (I read two of Donald Barthelme's stories: "Porcupines at the University" and "The Baby.")).

So anyway, there I was, at Publix, getting some cash back. The teller, who like most cash register workers at every-grocery-store-everywhere-in-this-country (and, again, incidentally, the grocery clerks at stores in Berlin were generally friendly and talkative (until the point in the transaction where it became clear that Ich konnte nur ein bisschen Deutsch sprechen.)) said approximately nothing to me while ringing up my groceries, went to give me my $20 cash back in a single bill, so I asked for a ten and two fives. She gave me two tens and two fives. I noticed, and thought to myself "Oh lucky day!"

Now, ethically, I have no problem with drawing a lucky card from the community chest (although this instance was only a Beauty Contest reward for the usually more lucrative Bank Error in my Favor); if anything, I should be handed ten extra dollars from the behemoth chain of shitty grocery stores that is Publix. But I only went about five steps before I turned around and went back to the register where I had just checked out and handed back the ten extra dollars. The clerk was shocked to the point of incredulity. She seemed to doubt that she could have possibly given me too much money, but I was insistent, gave her back the ten bucks and quickly left.

There's no doubt in my mind that this happened because of the amount of time that I spent in my life working at a grocery store. Being ten dollars off on your drawer count, while not being a huge offense, necessarily, is definitely not a good thing to have happen to you, and I would imagine, especially at a giant impersonal grocery store like the one where this incident occurred. But I also know that it probably wouldn't have really endangered her job to have just taken the money and left. I can't offer a whole lot of explanation, except to reflect that perhaps, whereas the "Pete Ethic" is deeply tied to the "Pete Rhetoric," the "Pete Morality" is perhaps driven by the "Pete Aesthetic," and therefore capable of overriding the Pete Ethic with quasi-instinctual actions. Or is it the Pete Morality that drives the Pete Aesthetic?

Which is too bad, 'cause I could of used the ten bucks. Brewery Ommegang's new beer, Ommegeddon had finally made it to shelves down here in Miami, and in a quasi-instinctual action grabbed a bottle and purchased before I even knew what was going on. Cost? $10. Damn.