{"id":1606,"date":"2012-09-13T22:20:33","date_gmt":"2012-09-14T02:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/?p=1606"},"modified":"2012-09-13T22:20:33","modified_gmt":"2012-09-14T02:20:33","slug":"living-senior-citizen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/?p=1606","title":{"rendered":"Living with a “Senior Citizen”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/em>In life, some things should be kept private, while others should be shouted from the rooftops, proclaimed in the town squares, and posted on various social media platforms.<\/p>\n

What I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m about to share falls into the later category.<\/p>\n

On Thursday evening two weeks ago, LCB returned from a trip to Harris Teeter (a popular chain grocery store found in much of the South), put away the groceries, and sat down at his desk, his grocery receipt still in hand. I was working at my desk nearby, so LCB began a monologue<\/del> initiated a conversation with me. Suddenly, he looked down at his receipt and stopped talking mid-sentence. His jaw dropped.<\/p>\n

He had been given the Thursday senior citizen discount on his receipt.<\/p>\n

Y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all, LCB is in his forties.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

He sat there, stunned into an uncharacteristic muteness, so I tried to comfort him by chalking it up to some weird coding anomaly in the store\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s discount pricing system. I assured him that no one sober and with full mental capacities would consider him a senior citizen.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Or maybe it was a slip of the hand,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I suggested, now operating in full helpmate mode.<\/p>\n

The next Thursday night, he walked into the house looking stricken.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153You are not going to believe what happened to me,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he mouthed while finishing up a phone call and unloading some groceries he had just purchased.\u00c2\u00a0 After he ended his call, I tried to guess what had happened. I threw out a few possibilities.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Oh no, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s way worse than any of those,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he responded. He fumbled with his words for a minute, his eyes wider than normal, and then out it came.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153This time, the cashier point-blank asked<\/em> me if I qualified for the senior citizen discount.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all, I tried not to laugh too hard.<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t my best attempt.<\/p>\n

Clearly reeling from this most recent turn of events in a world now LCB-unfriendly, he grabbed his computer, determined to research the parameters of the senior citizen discount. He speculated that the discount might, in reality, have been softened to include anyone middle-aged and up.<\/p>\n

Not really, it turns out. Well, not unless 60 is the new 40, anyway.<\/p>\n

The only comfort I could then offer was to suggest that maybe Harris Teeter instructs its employees to offer it to anyone looking even remotely middle-aged, just to be safe.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

He just stared at me, incredulous at my proffer.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

I suppose it would be in bad taste to mention that today, on a very fine Thursday afternoon, I shopped at the very same Harris Teeter and was not<\/em> offered the senior citizen discount.<\/p>\n

As you may have guessed, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an abundance of bad taste floating around my house tonight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In life, some things should be kept private, while others should be shouted from the rooftops, proclaimed in the town squares, and posted on various social media platforms. What I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m about to share falls into the later category. On Thursday evening two weeks ago, LCB returned from a trip to Harris Teeter (a popular chain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1257,1256,105,100,1255,1254],"class_list":["post-1606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-islandlife","tag-funny-harris-teeter-stories","tag-harris-teeter","tag-island-life","tag-island-living","tag-qualifying-for-the-senior-citizens-discount","tag-senior-citizen-discounts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.anislandmom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}