I'm scanning a can of soup and the machine tells me, in a woman's recorded voice, that there is an unexpected item in the bagging area. There isn't. I moved my hand too fast. So I stand there, waiting for a human in a red vest to walk over and press a button that fixes me, and while I wait I watch the whole store do the same thing at six other stations.
All of us frozen mid-task, hands hovering, faces going slack, apologizing to a scale.
Up there you can't see any of this. You can't see a single person. You can't see the store. The whole eastern seaboard is a smear of gray and green under a blue rind of air so thin that if you scaled the planet to a basketball, the part we breathe would be thinner than the coat of varnish. Everything anyone has ever done happened inside that varnish. Including this. Including me, arguing with a soup can.
The vest arrives. She keys in her code without looking, the way you'd swat a fly, and the voice thanks me and I thank the voice and neither of us means it. She's already three stations down. She has done this maybe four hundred times today.
I used to think this machine was designed to remove her, and it mostly is. But it can't. It keeps needing her, every ninety seconds, to lean in and confirm that a person is still standing there. That's the only reason she has the job at all: the machine cannot finish a single transaction without a human within arm's reach.
I put the soup in my bag.
I got to watch our whole thin blue rind from the outside, and I still can't buy dinner without her.