[gmku]

In the 70s I went in to work stoned a couple of times. I'm not proud of this. But it was the 70s, and I was, well, young and stupid.

The first time, I was a part-time cashier/stockboy/whatever at a local but very busy downtown/campus drug store. This particular afternoon of my shift was particularly beautiful, and I decided that making the bike ride downtown would be even more beautiful if I were just a little stoned. I thought if I got only a little stoned, it would wear off by the time my shift started. For whatever reason, I was feeling very stoned when the store manager assigned me to a cash register. At one point, as I was trying to figure out a dollar's worth of change for the customer at the register, I looked up to see about 20 people in line waiting. All sorts of looks on their faces, from puzzled, to bemused, to annoyed, to downright angry. Yikes.

I think the drawers came up quite short that afternoon, but there were other clerks on my shift that the manager had been suspecting (and later confirmed) were stealing from the registers, so she never blamed me--though I'm sure I had a lot to do with it. I'm sure people thought they were getting good deals that day at good old Drug Fair. "Go to the line with the stoner boy running the register! Make him break a 20!"