Achievement Unlocked
At lunchtime today I volunteered for a desperate mission to the corner shop – armed with a hand-written list of groceries, and “lady things” (a term coined by our youngest daughter – figure it out yourself).
I crossed paths with nobody en-route, and discovered an empty shop – which was quite curious, given that a lady was waiting outside with a dog on a lead. I'm still curious who she might have been waiting for. Inside the shop I half-expected everything to have doubled in price, given the various local citizen journalists posting ever-more fantastical stories on Facebook. Thankfully it appears their stories are somewhat fabricated.
I found almost everything on my list before making an enquiry with the shop-assistant.
“Do you have any eggs?”
He pointed to the opposite side of the shop.
I reached the shelf where they should have been at the same time the assistant did, and started laughing. It was a very nice shelf, but it had no eggs on it. It did have a price label for eggs though. I'll give it that.
A few moments later – while arranging my treasure trove on the counter, the assistant snuck into the stock room, and re-appeared with a box of six eggs in his hand, smiling.
“I was going to keep these for myself. They are the last box. You can have them.”
We both smiled, and I didn't quite know what to say. I might have said thank-you quite a few times in a row.
On the way home, I imagined a scene holding the eggs up in the shop, light bursting from them, and the “achievement unlocked” music from the Legend of Zelda video game bursting out of somewhere.