There was a trainee at the station. Now, one should be careful about calling trainees stupid. For many, food service is a surprisingly stressful job, even when one is merely pulling sandwiches and cokes out of a cooler, and I doubt employees at Greyhound stations receive all the training they really need. So rather than call the trainee stupid, we will calmly and non-confrontationally suggest that she was unusually inefficient. It wasn't that she required her co-worker's help with every computer keystroke; like we said, she was probably undertrained. We will not concern ourselves with the fact that she had so much difficulty swiping a credit card through the reader: I know a few otherwise intelligent people who can't master magnetic strips. We could mock more aggressively the fact that at some point during her day she had begun to keep all her bills in a single pile, and thus was caught by surprise when, after taking my order, found that she was out of both ones and fives. But I've seen trainees make that mistake before. I will call her inefficiency unusual because of this conversation she had with me:

"Yes sir, how may I help you?"

"I'd like a barbequed sandwich and a Dr. Pepper please."

"I'm sorry, what would you like?"

"A barbequed sandwich and a Dr. Pepper, please."

She walked the two feet to the cooler, where the various sandwiches were stacked in appetizing vacuum-sealed wrappers. "What was the second thing you asked for?"

"A Dr. Pepper, please."

She retrieved a tasty beverage. "And what else?"

"A barbequed sandwich."

She consulted the sandwiches for a while, and asked me, "steak barbeque?"

"Is there more than one kind?" I asked. I couldn't see the sandwiches well from my side of the counter.

She didn't answer, but instead brought me two sandwiches. "Does it matter which kind, sir?"

While I struggled with the urge to call her a fucking MORON, her co-worker intervened. "Those are cheeseburgers," she said. "He wanted a barbequed sandwich."

Now, as I say, there were four of us from the bus, and I was last in line. While I was waiting for my chance with the trainee, a fifth passenger, a septuagenarian woman with a pink sweater and a headwrap, walked up to the counter and said, "Hey, is there someplace I can buy food?"

"Yes," said the more experienced of the two employees. "Here."

"Well, it's just that I can see that there are all these people waiting in line to buy tickets, and I just got off a bus, and the driver said we only have a ten-minute break."

"Um, we all got off the same bus you did," I said. Irritated, she wandered off.

She soon wandered back, and got in line behind me. After I placed my order and the trainee called for the shift leader to get some change, the older lady was served by the experienced employee, but didn't leave. She stood a few feet away from the counter, with what she no doubt thought was an evil grin on her face. The shift leader, the experienced employee, and the trainee were now all standing behind the counter, looking for ones and fives.

"Thank you ladies very much," said the older woman.

"You're welcome," replied the shift leader.

"I really appreciate the way you handle things."

"You're welcome."

"I see you have on a nice white shirt too." Puzzled by the woman's comment, I turned to look at her, then turned to look at the shift leader. The shift leader was, in fact, wearing a white shirt, and it was heavily stained. I turned back to look at the older woman, who was still staring at them, grinning. I took my change and left.

That wasn't a very good story, either. I'm sorry. On the plus side, we've passed through a South Central Arkansas Transit station. I accidentally discovered South Central Arkansas Transit on the Web one time, when looking for scat sites.

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