Bad Karma

Nat and I always talk about this - we both have what we like to call Bad Customer Service Karma. She and I are always the ones that the receptionist will ignore, even if she or I are like two feet away from said receptionist. I'm always the one whose order of one limeade from Sonic takes an hour to be made for me. (And then the "limeade" ends up being Sprite! What's up with that???) The one whose green salad at Texas Roadhouse takes an hour to be brought out to me. I'm the one whose order at Arby's is always messed up.

Once, when I was pregnant with Sadie, Ben and I were running errands all over the huge expanse of the Salt Lake Valley, and I was, of course, starving, so we saw an Arby's and went to the drive-through. (This was back when we could afford Arby's.) I ordered my favorite - mozzarella sticks - and we drove away. I open my box, bite into the first stick, and... no cheese. There was no cheese inside. Somehow, the cheese had slid out of the breaded crusty layer and landed... who knows where. Nowhere in my sack. Miffed, I grab a different mozzarella stick. No cheese. My entire order of mozzarella sticks was mozzarella-less! I was so upset that I wanted to cry, and we were on our way to an appointment, so we didn't have time to turn around and demand new mozzarella sticks. So I just starved for a couple of hours, which is like an eternity for a pregnant woman.

Another area in my bad karma curse is the Wal-Mart shopping experience. Without fail, I always select the jacked-up shopping cart. The one that you have to pull with all your might to turn in one direction. The one that always tries to go to the right when you just want to go straight. The one with the two wheels that are stuck in place. And I never discover that the shopping cart is jacked-up until I've already gone way far into the store and gotten one or two items already. And then, when it's time to check out, I always pick the line with the elderly lady who takes about ten years to fill out a check to pay, and then the middle-aged lady behind her wants to argue about the prices of every single item with the cashier, and the cashier is new, or really chatty and taking forever talking up the customers. I always pick that line, and then sigh as I watch the other cashiers quickly and quietly ringing up everyone else, people who were comparatively three or four people behind me when I chose my ill-fated line.

Just bad karma. I've learned to live with it. :) But here's my question: Don't you have to do something bad in order to have bad karma revisited upon you? If so, what I have isn't karma. It's something else. I don't know what. Because I've never been one of those jerks who yells at waitresses. I would rather die than do that. I've never, like, I don't know... put a little stick into a wheel of a shopping cart to jam it for the next person. And I haven't stolen a shopping cart. (Did you know that shopping carts are really expensive to make? They're, like, worth a thousand dollars each, or something crazy. There is a national Prevent Shopping Cart Theft week, encouraging people not to steal them, because they are so expensive. I learned this in my days as a newspaper reader for a press-clipping service. I was the person who got stuck reading Shopping Cart Weekly and Wire Rope News. All the magazines that didn't have good clips in them. I'll have to post about that another time. What an interesting and crazy job!) I don't write checks in the check- out line. In fact, I'm one of those nice people who, upon seeing a guy behind me with just a loaf of bread, ask him to go ahead of me. I never argue about a price with a cashier. Come to think of it, I spent an entire horrible summer working as a cashier at Shopko, which alone should ensure me against bad check-out line karma, don't you think??