Christmas Spirit

I wouldn't have expected to glimpse even the dimmest glimmer of the Christmas spirit during a dispute over a bottle of buffered aspirin.

Maybe it was just a coincidence.

Or perhaps aspirin possesses powers beyond its well-publicized abilities to dull headaches, cool fevered foreheads and thin the blood so that it can flow more freely through neglected arteries.

I'd rather believe, though, that what happened had something to do with the season.

What happened is that, four days before Christmas, I was standing in line at a local store.

The line was a long one, typical of the date and of the procrastinating proclivities of some gift-buyers. Me, for instance.

There were just two customers ahead of me when the aspirin issue arose. The woman who was buying the medicine insisted it was on sale. There was, she told the clerk, a sign that spelled out the terms of this bargain, and the sign was affixed to the very shelf from which she procured the bottle.

The clerk picked up the old-fashioned rotary telephone that dangles next to the cash register. She asked whoever answered the phone which department she needed to dial for aspirin-related queries.

I knew right then I wasn't getting out of the store for a good while. You know you're in for a wait when it takes at least two phone calls to pin down the discount status of aspirin.

After a couple minutes — I had time to scan the magazine covers and peruse the display of breath mints, anyway — an employee arrived bearing a slip of paper. I didn't hear the entire conversation that ensued but the gist of it was that the paper, which might have been the very sale sign the customer mentioned, showed conclusively that the discount applied only to bottles of aspirin bigger than the one the woman had chosen.

This revelation seemed to disappoint the clerk more than it did the customer.

This might explain why the clerk then punched the wrong key on the register, which prompted her to make a third phone call. After another minute or so an employee arrived and fed into a slit in the register a sheet of pink paper which, so far as I could tell, corrected the clerk's mistake.

That's basically the entire episode, and it lasted, I estimate, eight minutes. I can't give a precise duration because I didn't think an aspirin issue could be quite so involved and so when I started keeping track, by way of the clock on the wall, the situation was well under way.

The story itself is, of course, quite a common one. Most people, I suspect, have endured a similar ordeal in a retail business. The customer misreads a coupon or can't make out the tiny letters. The credit card phone line is down. The cashier's thumb strays onto the wrong button.

What surprised me, though, about the aspirin mishap was not what happened, but what did not happen.

No one glared. No one complained. No one, so far as I could tell, muttered an obscenity. No one stomped away from the stalled line I was in and tried to wedge into an adjacent line.

The customer didn't upbraid the clerk. The clerk, though she seemed a bit harried — as I would have been — made several apologies to the customer and none carried even a hint of either condescension or anger.

This isn't how such scenes usually play out.

An unexpected delay in a store almost invariably strains someone's patience past its breaking limit. Yet all the customers behind me handled this glitch in their undoubtedly busy holiday schedules with aplomb.

Forgive my naivete, but I like to think the nearness of Christmas contributed to the absence of animosity. It cheers me to believe that the people who stood there, their arms beginning to ache under their burden of gifts, were thinking not of the minutes they were losing, but of the smiles they would soon gain when eager fingers ripped at glossy paper.

Jayson Jacoby is the editor of the Baker City Herald.