Two supermarket cashiers have taken a 30-minute break from their conversation to serve customers with as much contempt as possible.
The two cashiers – Svetlana Borg and Svetlana Camilleri – started their chat at Clever Supermarket in Birkirkara when their shift began at 6:30am.
“We always cover a wide variety of topics,” Borg told Bis-Serjetà.
“That’s right,” agreed Camilleri. “We both follow a tight schedule that we come up with every morning during a pre-shift brainstorming session.
“For example, today we started with an in-depth discussion on my Aunty Tessie’s knee operation, miskina. We went into a lot of detail – which knee it was, the precise nature of the injury, how handsome her surgeon was, the weird relatives of the guy who was in the bed next to her, how annoying it is that you can’t buy junk food at Mater Dei anymore, whether she’ll be able to go back to work at the factory…”
After a quick two-minute rest period at 9am, during which the Borg casually scanned a packet of chewing gum for a customer who had been waiting for two hours, they promptly returned to the timetable.
“Next on the agenda was Shania, one of the cashiers who works the afternoon shift. The other day she changed her profile picture on Facebook from a photo of her and her boyfriend Cleaven to a photo of just her. But she didn’t change her relationship status. So what happened? Did they break up? And if so, why? Did she find out about him cheating on her with Sherizienne? Did he find out about her cheating on him with Josmar? Or did she just feel like a change of pic?” said Borg.
“To be honest it was mostly speculative and we didn’t make a lot of headway. We’ll have to come back to this tomorrow,” added a clearly frustrated Camilleri.
Exhausted after failing to reach any solid conclusions on the Shania affair, another brief customer-interaction session followed at 10:03am.
“Smile and say thank you? Do you think I have time for niceties when we should’ve started discussing last night’s Ħbieb u Għedewwa three minutes ago?” Borg told a customer after he accused her of having bad manners.
“Do these people not know that Edmund cheated Saviour out of his inheritance after the death of their mother Maria Pia? Or that Luca is planning to do something crazy to Turu but won’t tell Feliċ what his plans are?”
“Philistines, the lot of them. All they care about is customer service,” agreed Camilleri.
After the pair had finished discussing the episode and made their prediction’s for next week’s instalment, it was now time for their much awaited long break.
“We’d really love to carry on chatting, but sometimes you need to give your voice a rest,” Borg said as she reached for a flask of lemon and honey tea, while used her free hand to scan items.
At the time of writing, the pair had just ended their work-break and started debating who would be the next PN leader should Adrian Delia be forced to step down.
