Don't Bring Me Down. Are You Pickin' Up What I'm Layin' Down?

Mrs. Hillbilly Mom is fit to be tied.

Okay. That's not quite true. Mrs. Hillbilly Mom would not be considered, by any stretch of the imagination, as being "fit" unless perhaps by one of those 900-pound people who must be cut out of their house walls and loaded in the back of a pickup truck (a Ford F350) for transport to a livestock-weighing scale before Dr. Nowzaradan tells them to lose 300 pounds before he will do a gastric bypass on them.

Nor is Mrs. Hillbilly Mom tie-able, since she will not sit still for such shenanigans, especially after her own #1 son was hog-trussed at the tender age of eight by some middle grade kids at summer school where he went for enrichment because he's a genius, with the custodian even supplying the rope, and the staff member in charge LAUGHING about it when I said why he wouldn't be back.

But that is neither here nor there, because this is all about Mrs. Hillbilly Mom's gambling attempt today, and the crankpot who rained on her parade.

I saw the stern lady behind the register when I went into the gas station chicken store. Normally we are simpatico, she being my clerk of choice over that smirking bald man, though I must say he gives me more scratch-off winners. I only had three tickets to redeem. And I had already scratched off the bar code, the code number, and the little rectangle with the three ID numbers. All she had to do was poke it in the machine like a time card. That machine would tell her the amount of the win, and all she had to do was print a receipt for the total. It's not like it was a giant win, or an obscure number. Thirty dollars. Round number. I also had one corn dog for The Pony, with the ticket from the kitchen. Not even any chicken parts for Mrs. HM. Just thirty dollars of winnings, and thirty dollars of new tickets, and $1.93 out of two ones for the corn dog.

But no. That crankster had to take out her bad mood on me. She was even more stern than usual. Sighing. Slapping my tickets around. Kind of sneering. The chubby happy clerk said, "I'm leaving now." It was, after all, the stroke of 2:00. And Crankster said, "Can I go with you?" Hmpf. I wanted to say, "Um. I'm right here. Your customer? Who's always right?" But I didn't. No need to poke a rabid dog with a stick. She would not have acted that way if the owner was there. And she would have fallen all over herself helping me CHEERFULLY if the owner's WIFE had been there. They're all afraid of her. Even the owner.

The reason for her badder than usual mood, I think, was the lady ahead of me, who handed her a bunch of those fill-in long tickets people use to choose their numbers for PowerBall and MegaMillions. She kept pulling them out of the machine and giving them back to the customer, saying, "That one's blank. And that one's blank, too." Not my fault. Also not my fault that the guy waiting behind me had a fountain soda and some chicken. I had my transaction ready. As simple as could be.

And to top it off, Crankster only gave me $8.00 worth of winners.

Who's cranky now?