Day 4 - Misery has a name. Margaret.

Today we paused to catch our breath and tried to do some washing. The coin-operated laundry next to our holiday flat only takes 1 dollar coins and since we needed a couple of things from Coles, we decided to kill two birds with one stone. With long queues at the other counters, Carmen and I glanced at each other, braced ourselves and lined up in front of the till manned by the cloud of darkness who had refused to serve us the previous day. Ok, admittedly, we are cowards - Carmen and I both counted the items in our basket twice to make sure we weren’t over the 12 item express checkout limit and after briefly debating whether Darth Vader would count a sealed pack of 6 hangers as a single pack or say that technically they were 6 items in a pack, we proudly placed our items on her counter. With my most winning smile, determined to rouse some semblance of humanity from this rock of misery, I stole a glance at her name tag:
‘Exactly 10 items – see we remembered, Margaret!’ I announced proudly to her, even using her name for dramatic effect.
Stony silence and a blank hostile stare as though I was from the moon.
‘What?’
I swallowed hard. I was not going to let this bastion of blackness deflate my happy mood today. I was in sunny Australia and everyone we had met except this wretched creature of gloom had gone out of their way to be friendly and welcoming:
’Only 10 items!’ I repeated cheerfully, and pointed upwards at the small sign above her till,
‘Remember yesterday…we…’ I trailed off as my eyes searched in vain for the sign which was nowhere to be seen..
She shook her head with an impatient sigh as she threw our items into a bag muttering under her breath:
‘Somedays I don’t know why I bother!’
I don’t know what she meant by that and I didn’t ask.
My wife was only slightly less intimidated than me, especially since I was safely between her and Attila the Hun’s clone. I froze, as she piped up, tentatively from the rear: ‘And if possible, could you include a couple of dollar coins in our change, please?’.
Blackness flung open the till, shaking her head: ‘I don’t have any – they leave me the whole day without any change!’ she announced loudly, the other cashiers studiously ignoring her.

We exited quickly through the doors, still short of half of our objective - coins for the laundry and now unable to muster the courage to ask for change without feeling obliged to buy something. Then we spotted a little Italian ice-cream shop (Gelatari) - any excuse for an icecream!
The friendly shop assistant handed us the tiniest ice cream I have ever seen, (Bambini’ ice creams are delicious, but, and again, I do not exaggerate, they are the length of my index finger including the cone.) (I do not have large hands either). As she took the 20 dollar note, we asked for dollar change.
‘O no, so sorry’ she gushed apologetically, in typical open and friendly Australian fashion, ‘but we have none – it has been a busy day.’
She tried to help by offering us 2 dollar coins but we thanked her and declined.. Thoroughly underwhelmed by the day’s lack of success after all of our stellar achievements of earlier in the week, we headed home. The jet lag now beginning to really make itself felt, we tried - again not very successfully - to catch up on some much needed sleep and recharge our batteries. O well tomorrow is another day. No worries.