Once Bitten

  1. purejoy says:

    Wow. Awkward.
    Stop by the baking aisle and get white chocolate candy bark. You can dip the nutter butters in it, use tiny black mini M&Ms for eyes and voila. Ghosts. Tis the season, y’know. Bob the Baker is scary.

  2. Beth says:

    I would never be able to set a boundary with that guy and would totally have to change grocery stores. Of course, if Bob is talking about you to other people, that might be your chance to spread some interesting (fictional?) tidbits about yourself. 😉

  3. buffi says:

    Bob the CREEPER. Do they sell restraining orders at the supermarket?

    There is a sacker at one of the grocery stores here who always makes it a point to come to my line and tell me how “nice” I look today. Doesn’t matter if I’m dressed for work or making a last minute morning run in my sweats and ball cap, there he is, “You look so nice today!” Ugh. And now he knows my license plate number. Great. I avoid that market when at all possible.

  4. Litenarata says:

    Could you maybe mention it to the store manager? Hopefully the manager could tell Bob to quit socializing and following customers around without even mentioning you specifically. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t have other “buddies” too!

  5. Leslie says:

    Bob is not a baker — I know exactly who you’re talking about, and I just got the whole spiel with the autographed picture of the band last week!

  6. bhk says:

    you don’t think Bob would ever google you, do you? ’cause if he found this post, talk about awkward…

  7. Denise Madderra George says:

    It sounds like Bob has a social disorder, a form of autism. I’m no psychiatrist and since my son has high functioning autism it’s kind of my go to diagnosis, but the conversations you describe certainly seem to carry the markings. It sounds like he’s perseverating and not reading your social cues and not recognizing boundaries. If so, he can’t read your facial expression, body language or tone of voice. You’d need to tell him with actual words, “Bob, I need to go now and can’t talk anymore. Thanks.” Where that might be abrupt or offensive to many people, to an autistic person, it’s the only way they know they need to do something different and often it doesn’t hurt their feelings at all. It seems normal to them that a person would say exactly what they are thinking. Talk to him directly and politely like you would to a young child and don’t expect him to instinctively know that you want him to leave you alone and let you shop.

  8. spinetingler says:

    There’s a cashier at the self-checkout line who is especially chatty – she came over this week, took a package out of my bag of scanned items, and started discussing the ingredients. If I wanted to have a discussion with the Harris-Teeter staff, I WOULDN’T HAVE CHOSEN THE SELF-CHECKOUT LINE!

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