The Deckplates

So it happens again. I am at the Exchange to purchase a few items and you would think this is an easy in and an easy out right? Even the guy ahead of me had a few items, so getting out of there and going back to the barracks wouldn’t be too long. Of course that doesn’t happen, because the guy buys like five t-shirts and the person at the register is an old lady. She has to take every shirt off the hanger as slow as possible and folds the shirts even slower.

Finally she gets done with this guy’s shirts and I pretty much scan the items for her to get the hell out of there. Then I decide I wont want to make food, so I stop to get a ham sandwich. This is an even simpler task that would get me right out and of course out of no where a loud screech blasts into my ears. A kid probably two to three years old is running around screaming for God knows what and everyone is looking at this child wondering the same thing, where are his parents? Believe me that was going through my head.

Why can’t sailors walk in and out of the exchange without the hassle of slow check-out and shrieking kids. This month had a day just before Mother’s Day known as Military Spouse Appreciation Day. I don’t know about you, but Navy spouses, especially wives, have been the biggest pain while being stationed in Japan. Yes, a lot of the guys I work with have wives and they would agree when I say that they suck the pay checks out of them. When you are at the store, they congregate in front of the dairy section and talk about how 2% is better than fat free. Then they go in the checkout line with three items and contest the price because it is cheaper in the catalog and the little old lady from before goes around to other registers to verify the reduced price.

If anything, spouses should honestly remain in the states, because the number of single sailors in Japan are a lot greater than those with spouses, yet they are still capable of slowing us down when we are trying to get simple tasks done like buying food.