Warning: Does not Work Well With Small Children

This morning, a matter got my dander up. I know I'm a bitcher and moaner from way back. It doesn't take much to get me going. It is what I do. [Ohmygod you should hear me in the car. Everyone in the world is a bad driver except for me. And I will tell you exactly what you're doing wrong from the comfort, safety, and where you can't hear me inside my car.] But when it involves my children -well then- GET OUT OF MY WAY.

My daughter approached me while I was packing up lunches into backpacks. "I want to buy my lunch today", she says. Which is fine, of course, and I say so. But she's anxiously tapping her fingers on one hand against the fingers on the other. And she looks concerned. So I ask her what ever is the matter, dear daughter.

"I forgot my number", she states in a tone as if she'd just told me that she lost a family heirloom that I'd cautioned her not to touch.

You see, I make my kids' lunches everyday, and every once in a while they like to buy cafeteria food. The system at the school is such that each child is assigned a number (almost like a barcode, that is given to them by the cashier, no less) for buying lunch. They get in line, give the cashier their money, state their number, the cashier punches it into a computer and they're free to buy one main entree and various sides and a drink for $2.75.

Apparently this number is very VERY important.

"If you forgot it just tell the lady", I tell her.

Girl-Child looks nervous. Her eyes get a little well-y-uppy. And I get very suspicious. What is vexing my child so? [and why am I speaking as if it is 1865?]

"She told me that if I forgot my number again I would have to go to the end of the line and be the last one to buy lunch".

WTF? I'm sorry. She told you WHAT? Mind you that this is a child who has MAYBE bought her lunch FOUR TIMES EVER IN HER LIFE. And another "mind you"? It took everything I had in me to not drive helter skelter up to the school and have words with said woman.

How hard is this job? Seriously? You sit at a register in an elementary school and collect money from children. That's it. I get that it's boring, and monotonous, and repetitious. But to tell a little six year old girl, who doesn't buy her lunch often enough to have her stupid fucking number memorized, that she will have to wait until ALL THE OTHER CHILDREN buy their lunch before she can. To THREATEN MY CHILD? Because, why? Why? I don't understand how you could be having such a bad day doing this job that you have to intimidate a little girl.

There are many things my child will have to worry about in her adolescent years; like fitting in with her peers, and temptations, and bullies, and cliques, and studying hard enough for and doing well on a test, and if that boy likes her or like-likes her and does she like-like him back, and how I don't know what I'm talking about when I tell her that none of it matters, all of the angsty angst, because after you graduate high school you're likely to never see any of those people ever again and they won't be the most important people in your lives, and how she'll tell me that it's different for her and how I just don't understand because my life is not her life and how she won't listen when I tell her that it's ALL THE SAME SHIT that has been happening for generations but with new improved technology - because that's what kids and teens do. They believe the world revolves around them and that what is happening to them is unique and has never happened before, and...

She shouldn't be standing here in the kitchen freaking out over forgetting the godforsaken magical lunch-buying number. This is not something that should be causing my child any stress whatsoever.

I may just have to join my daughter for lunch.