So just after Christmas last year, with a couple of gift cards in hand, I finally bought myself a new wallet before the old one crumbled into leather dust or, worse, became akin to my dad’s wallet held together with duct tape, one of those big red rubber bands that used to wrap Sunday newspapers when there WERE Sunday newspapers and I wasn’t dating myself and the sad knowledge that if it was going to fall apart it certainly wasn’t going to be from bulging with too much cash, just credit cards and the debt in them.
When I finally cleared out all that was in it and started organizing everything into the new wallet (and after an almost audible old wallet last breath sigh as it was finally allowed to give up the ghost) I noted I had a couple of plastic window slots one of which folded out. With my license already covered in a different window slot (it’s right here officer, not the best pic mind you but cool wallet right? You’re pulling out your cuffs why?) I thought the fold out plastic window would be perfect for my Price Chopper card, my grocery store of choice, to make it an easy pull out for the scanning as I’m there quite often.
For almost the last year then I’ve been pulling this card out of its new wallet fold out plastic window slot, even tearing it a little (this is how a wallet’s demise starts) and presenting it to the cashier and then putting it back.
Then this morning, on a stop for a few things for my lunch I pulled out the card again from its new wallet fold out plastic window slot at the checkout and presented it again for a scan when the latest cashier said to me “Why don’t you just leave it in there but with the back of the card barcode facing out instead of the front of the card like you had it? Then you don’t have to keep pulling the card out to turn it over to get scanned? Just flip open your wallet?”
I stood there for a moment, speechless, stunned, dumbfounded, even almost a little frightened, mind blown with that ‘whoosh’ both hands away from head dramatics …
… fucking genius.
(stay tuned for more Tales From the Dim … new adventures in dim always waiting right around the next Frankenberry corner)
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