Life among the natives

It took 3 days for me to get toilet paper in my home town.

      In the end, it wasn't hard to do. It just required a little bit of being a bad person.


 I tried, I really tried to be patient and follow the rules. But it wasn't working. I couldn't get shit tickets, chicken, clorox or a goddamn loaf of bread.

 Oh, I got them. On day 3, after wasting two half days, I came home with everything I needed by 0830.

 OK, so I live in South Florida. Sorta a hotspot for the Kung Flu, because the snowbirds decamped from NY/NJ and all came down here a few weeks ago, and brought their plague with them.

   To protect the vulnerable elderly, all grocery stores are having senior-only opening hours, where the first hour of business is for people 60 and up only.

  Again, I live in South Florida. Fucking EVERYONE is over 60. End result, by the time senior hour is over, everything is cleaned out. I learned this on day 2, when standing in line outside a local Publix with all the other early birds, and the old folks came parading out with shitpaper, meat, clorox jugs, and what have you. By the time I got in the store, there had been hundreds of seniors in before me.

 So, the next day was Sunday, and I was up at 6am, and at the grocery store by 0645. There were 20-30 cars there already. At 0650, I put on my surgical mask and took my hat off, to show off my being half-bald. Being fair-haired and fair of skin, and with a now mostly-white beard. and working outdoors, I look older. With the mask, I thought I looked plausibly middle-aged.

 I rolled in about #10 through the store, made a beeline for the TP aisle, and got a 12-pack of shit tickets. I raced on for the meat section, got a pair of steaks, and on to the next thing on my list, in descending order of scarcity. All told, I was in the store about 15 minutes. I had a system in place.

 By the time I recrossed the paper goods aisle, maybe 3-4 minutes after I picked up my poop paper, there was a crowd of irate elderly people all jostling for access to the goods. The TP was gone within 7-8 minutes of store opening, I would guess.  I hit the registers and bailed.

       So, yeah, I might be a bad person for impersonating a fossil, but I'll be damned if my family is going to have a TP shortage.