Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“A new command I give you: Love one another.  As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

• John 13:34-35

A “sniglet,” according to Rich Hall of the old Not Necessarily the News (or NNTN) show, is a word that is not in the English language dictionary, but should be.  The video that follows has a few that my family still use all these many years later, like Yinkel, Furbling, and Carperpetuation.  Yes, and I have been guilty of Furbling and Carperpetuation on multiple occasions.

When I got my latest haircut, I told the barber that I was not a yinkel.  He must have known what a yinkel was, because my hair is so short, it would take me a year to start “yinkeling.”

And for a bonus sniglet, how about “Expressholes,” those folks that have more than the maximum number of items in the express lane.  Please, do not call them that.  They might think you said something else and a fight might break out.

Okay, now that you understand what a sniglet is, what made me think of needing new sniglets?

Well, we did not bump into any expressholes in our shopping in recent days, but there needs to be a word for:

1. The people that joy ride in the motorized carts for the handicapped shoppers and leave them at the far end of the parking lot with the battery drained.
2. Grocery stores that do not maintain their motorized carts so that they die after you just placed the frozen goods in the cart, at the far end of the store from the checkout.
3. Grocery stores that have their frozen section anywhere other than near the checkout.
4. Grocery stores that have a collision switch on the motorized carts to shut down forward travel if you are too close, so many feet away, from an unmoving object, and then they set the safety distance to be greater than the width of the store aisles, making you back up through the entire grocery store.
5. Stores that have ten available handicap motorized carts lined up, but none of them work.
6. The young people, with no apparent handicap, who steal their dead uncle’s handicap tag and take the only handicap space that the store has.
7. Stores that think one handicap parking place is enough.
8. And during COVID, the people that intentionally walk the wrong way down every store aisle.  You say possibly accidental, but I have watched them.  They cannot always be going the wrong way.  Accidentally, they would get it right once.
9. The checkout person that does a price check on three apples because they do not know which type of apple they are, although all seven varieties of apples in the produce section are the same price per pound and the clerk knows it.  There’s a price list sheet…  Right THERE!!

Most of these sniglet requests underline the plight of the handicapped.  Able-bodied teen-agers do not need the motorized carts to get around the department stores.  The tag that you hang from your rearview mirror is given to people who have difficulty walking short distances, say 200 yards (meters), and other restrictions preventing you from walking such distances.  (And by the way, the tag clearly states that you must not drive while the tag is in place, since it blocks your vision, but over half the people never remove it from the rearview mirror.)  In contrast however, if you are considered handicapped due to depression, you can walk the extra 200 yards.  It might bring more oxygen to the brain and help in other areas.  Thus, those handicap tags and the license plates are for specific handicaps.  I have heard people say that although people look able-bodied, they may have an unseen handicap, but there are few unseen handicaps that qualify under the stated rules, at least in the state of Pennsylvania where I am registered as such – difficulty walking 200 yards without assistance, always having my cane, noticeable limp, and sometimes resting along the way.

With the preceding explanation in mind, I have wanted to get a cane for blind people, drive into the parking lot and park in the handicap parking place.  Then put on dark glasses, and with the cane tapping in front of me, walk into the store.  If an old lady’s dentures fell out in shock…  It would be worth it.

On one day in question, my wife got a motorized cart that worked.  Three other people ran to the carts and took them for a spin also.  The carts are not regulated as the tags are, but Come On!!  If you can run to the cart, you do not need one.  In the store that day, with all the carts in use, my wife and one other lady, obviously elderly, had canes in their cart, both probably needing the canes.  But this was the second store that we went to for these shopping items.  The first had maybe eight broken down carts.  My wife had just left the hospital for being unable to walk five feet without assistance, 200 feet would have killed me, since I was the one holding her up.  I helped her back to the car without shopping.  In the store, the cart return worker had been waiting for the only working motorized cart to be returned, although it was his job to get the carts and return them to the store.  An elderly lady was waiting next to him in a wheelchair.  They were in for a long wait.  As we drove out of the parking lot without having shopped due to the lack of working carts, we saw the one working motorized cart, battery drained, leaning against the curb at the far end of the parking lot, maybe 500-600 yards (meters) from the store entrance, probably where no one had ever parked.  There was no reason for the cart to be there other than joy riding.  Those things do not roll that well when the batteries are dead, and since the cart return guy was inside the store waiting instead of doing his job, they would have never known where it was.

Now when it comes to the price check that delays your checkout fifteen minutes, making everyone behind you angry at you, rather than the clerk who already knows that the Honeycrisp, Fuji, Gala, etc. Apples are all the same price.  Sure, it screws up inventory, but the guy would not take our word for it when we said that they were Honeycrisp.  At that point, you just start laughing.

Then, with the entrance shifted due to controlling the store entrance for COVID-19 control, the protected pedestrian crossing is in the wrong place, although 90% of the people use it and then walk along the ropes to the entrance.  So, I carefully let the law-abiding pedestrians cross my path, and I finally get an opening, so I move through the pedestrian crossing.  But as I approach the COVID-19 checkpoint, a woman jumps in front of my car out of nowhere, from behind a tree.  I screech the brakes, careful not to hit the jaywalking, law-breaking female.  But instead of walking across the street, she rips her mask off for emphasis and gives me vile gestures, slamming her fists on the car hood, and provides curse-laden vitriol about she was here and she was in the right (which she was not) and how dare I not respect her position on the road.  I was not to do what I did again!  I turned to my wife and said, “Did you hear that?  She wants me to run over her next time!”

Then, we both laughed again.

Laugh!  Getting angry and frustrated is not worth the hassle!

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.