I don't know, you know, maybe it's me - maybe I have personal space issues, but they might very soon melt down into public grocery-store confrontation.

Yesterday at the grocery store, I went through the self-checkout line, where the standard way of not being an ass is to wait at the mouth of the space for one of the four terminals to open up. This is a convenient system because the first person waiting in line will always be the one to go next, because they just go to the one that opens up. These things can be unpredictable. The woman buying a lone carton of ice cream could spend four minutes rummaging through her car-sized purse for her wallet. The person buying twelve (maybe thirteen) items could have worked in the past as a cashier. You can't tell.

Anyhow, perhaps I was taking this little piece of societal common sense for granted, because yesterday a family of four came and stood RIGHT behind me at the damn self-checkout. I was at one of the two furthest away from the normal waiting area, and they stood at my elbow, talking loudly about cheese or something, while I pulled out every stop short of buying cigarettes to stall and punish them for their checkout line impugnity.