The Check-out Girl

Regina is without doubt the cheeriest person on the planet and she greets every customer with a smile so full of metal that one wonders whether it is entirely healthy for her to be working around scanners, swipe cards and tannoys on a daily basis.  In fact there seems to be a correlation between lengthy credit card processing and the amount that Reggie is babbling away to her fellow check-out pals.  Placing herself at the front row of tills in order to have the full attention of the other employees when she turns around, she loves nothing more than bantering loudly with all six of the beaming faces looking at her.  Customers are left bemused as Reggie cracks another indecipherable in-joke that leaves her colleagues shrieking with laughter, oblivious to the fact that the patrons depart the supermarket wondering whether they have something written on their back or stuck to their shoe.

However, Reggie would not feel an ounce of guilt if she were made aware of this; she often thinks that something truly terrible must happen to the customers somewhere between entering the supermarket and arriving at her till to make them behave the way that they do.  Perhaps those little morsels of turkey bacon on a toothpick offered at the deli counter are spiked with some evil potion.  She made the mistake of getting involved in a queue barging dispute once and vowed never to do so again.  Reggie suddenly found herself confronted by a very large woman who seemed to have got dressed in her 6 year-old daughter’s clothes that morning, shouting very slowly: ‘YOU MUST BE NEW HERE.  PEOPLE DO THIS ALL THE TIME.’ For sweet revenge, she looked at the accompanying baby in the trolley, dressed head to toe in pink, topped with a fuchsia band around a very bald head and asked the woman: ‘Is it a boy ma’am?’

She is saintly when yet another idiot forgets to weigh their fruit, even though she knows many of them have done it on purpose, knowing she will race back to the scales for them.  What these people will pay for a mango is totally beyond her – she only wishes she had as many air miles as the raspberries and then she could go home and see her children once in a while.

In a couple of months, Regina will start training the new recruits.  She caught her manager’s attention as a potential leader when she was spotted barking orders at various bag-packers, who all cower in her presence and avoid her conveyor belt like the plague.  Reggie loves the feeling of power.  She sings along loudly with Celine Dion whose emotional wails waft down the aisles…  She knows her heart will go on – as long as she never has to work at that damn French supermarket.