By Laura Hutchinson
DUNDRUM Shopping Centre is not my favourite place in the world. It’s just a hub for every Ugg-wearing young teen within a 40-mile radius. If it’s not talk about which Twilight vampire is hotter, it’s endless yapping about Justin Bieber’s hair. Even with your ears plugged or covered in headphones, your eyes are still assaulted by denim mini-skirts paired with black leggings everywhere you look, and hundreds of heads of extensions queuing – queuing! – to get into shops you’d need night-vision goggles to find your way around.
But it has one thing which makes me frequent the place about once a week – a 24-hour Tesco. I try to get in and out as quickly as possible, steering clear of the yummy mummies in the organic section and swerving to avoid the people at little stands trying to sell me the world’s most expensive cheese. But good ol’ fate, because she enjoys toying with me on a regular basis, usually has other plans.
Like last week. Myself and the other half had just pulled into the car park when the machine decided to run out of tickets. So there we were, stranded, with a queue of cars behind us, unable to proceed and definitely unable to back out. After pressing the help button and explaining the situation, a random voice assured us that someone was on the way.
Ten minutes later, there was still no sign. Now, as you know, I’m not the most patient of people at the best of times, so this was really testing me. Added to that was the fact that the people behind us were even more impatient, and several came up to enquire why we weren’t moving. Like we had just decided to stop the car and have a nice little nap for ourselves or something.
One particular woman, who clearly thought herself holier than thou, not only gave us grief, but proceeded to poison us by blowing cigarette smoke in through our open window. It took all my strength not to rip off her head and dance on her curls.
Instead, we pressed the help button again. ‘Cause that’s what mature adults do. Unless the guy was coming from Drogheda, we could see absolutely no reason why he hadn’t already rescued us. This time it was a different voice that answered and, infuriatingly, was completely unaware of the problem. Once again, we were assured that someone was on the way. I was starting to think there had been some mix up with the wiring and that we were just getting through to random McDonald’s all over the country, such was the level of assistance we were receiving.
Finally, 15 minutes into our adventure, a high-vis jacket appeared from the mist, strolling along in slow-mo like all heroes should. I was perplexed when I didn’t see any rolls of tickets in his hand, but assumed he must have some sort of Batman-like utility belt hidden under that billowing, luminous cape. He strode up to the machine, throwing us a reassuring “it’s OK, I’m here now” look, pressed the button and said... “Eh, yeah, the machine’s out of tickets. Can you lift the barrier?”
I was gobsmacked. I’d waited 15 minutes for that?! Far be it for me to speculate, but I imagine it felt similar to a person awaiting a life-saving organ donation, only to be confronted with a lump of play-dough. When I enquired as to how we were going to get back out, he said, “just press the button”. Oh great.
We shunned the free parking ticket that the Tesco lady offered us, informing her politely that the magic button was going to get us out. (I’m sure she was pushing a magic button of her own at that stage.) Back out in the car park, we pushed what felt like the millionth button that day. The guy was all, “Oh yeah, I’ll sort that out.” And how did he sort it out? By charging us for parking.
There are certain times when you walk away from an argument, despite being in the right, for fear that you will do something not only immoral, but illegal, and spend the rest of your days sharing a cell with ‘Stabby Stacey’. And that’s what we did. We paid the €2 and high-tailed it up the high road.
But let me tell you a little secret, dear readers: had the man I’m still trying to dupe into believing I’m a nice person until the ink’s dry on the marriage cert not been there, it would’ve been one small step for criminality, and one new cellmate for Stacey.