Grocery shopping on a weekday morning has some advantages. The line-ups tend to be shorter, sometimes the shelves are being stocked moments before I drag some blueberries under the wheels of my cart towards a stack of new red delicious apples and I can see where the stock-boy is trying to hide the bruisers.

The girl making the California rolls always nods hello and generally people are in a good mood. There is however an imbalance in terms of breakage during these morning hours while store clerks and busy moms get their hand-eye coordination up to speed.

Yesterday, the girl at the check-out smashed a bottle of red wine vinegar into the lane where shoppers wheel their carts and pay for their groceries. It was an accident and she quickly called for a clean-up on aisle six (just like in the movies) and sent a young boy to source a replacement bottle for the shopper in front of me. If I hadn’t already forced my food onto the conveyor belt, first in an organized fashion and then jamming things pyramid-style until I could no longer see over the crate of clementines, I would have backed out and found another open lane. I was stuck and beginning to take on the odour of vinegar, exactly what every woman wants to smell like for the rest of her day.

The young boy returned with a plastic jug of white vinegar. A couple of things wrong with this Lassie 1) the vinegar that broke was red wine vinegar and 2) the vinegar that broke was in a glass bottle, hence the breakage. Back he went to scour the balsamics and ultimately retrieved a product that was close enough for the woman’s marinating needs.

Through a series of double scanning, miscounting croissants and a couple of voids, the cashier now completely frazzled at 8:30am picked up my new cloth grocery bags and asked if I would like the food to be inserted into the new bags or if they were to be used as gifts.

Note to all secret Santas—grocery bags, bad gift.

On my way out to the parking lot, reeking of a cheesy 1980’s feminine hygiene commercial, one of the lenses from my sunglasses popped out and fell on the road. I removed the cheap glasses, they were cracked up the middle so there was no reason to attempt to force the lens back into the fragile frame.

Driving home wearing a monocle, smelling and looking like a hillbilly with an early morning need for freshness, I noticed something that made me forget the absurdity of my quick trip to the grocery store and brought a huge, toothy grin to my face.

It was a truck advertising professional painting. It had been decorated with fun graphics, the colours had been carefully selected and the script was a lovely font, complimenting the colour scheme on the rest of the vehicle.

In huge, flowy letters across the back of the truck read the following;

“No job to small”

Pssst. I think I just found one. The letter “o”.