Work Text:
"Find everything okay?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah." the man in the beanie replies, beginning to unload the contents of his cart onto the conveyor belt. Technoblade begins scanning the items, slowly tuning out the rest of the world, focused on the rhythmic beeping. Reach with right hand, pass item in front of the scanner, hear the beep, switch item to left hand, place item in open bag, move bag to extra cart when it gets full. It's become such a routine for him that he by the time he notices that the only thing in the man's cart so far have been individual twelve ounce bags of aquarium sand, he's scanned at least twenty of them.
Now Technoblade wouldn't consider himself a nosey person, quite the opposite really. If this were a normal transaction (or rather, as close to normal a transaction could be at a Walmart at 2:39 in the morning) he would continue scanning, ring up the total, wish the customer a good night, and the would be the entire social situation over and done with. But considering that he was now forty seven bags in with no end in sight, he felt he at least had the right, as the cashier, to address the fact that this man was buying enough sand to fill a large bathtub.
"Fish tank?" he hazards to ask, glancing up from the scanner to get a better look at Beanie Guy™.
"Wha?" Beanie Guy™ responds, yanking an earbud out and looking up from his phone.
"The sand? I was just asking if it was for a fish tank." By now he's scanned exactly fifty six bags of sand (he's started counting properly now) and still has what looks like another seventy waiting for him.
"Oh! No, nothing like that. It's for me! As a snack, y'know?"
Technoblade did not know. Nor did he particularly want to know. However, being the one who started this conversation, he now felt he had to see it through. So he continued.
"So...you...eat it?"
"Yeah! It's actually pretty good. There's a bunch of different brands, so they all have different textures, like me, I personally like this one cause of the crunch, since this is a coarser grain - I just wish they sold it in bigger bags though, cause I always have to buy a million of the tiny bags. I mean, I suppose I could buy a different brand, but I don't really think any of the others are as good as this one, y'know? I mean, some of them are too gritty, some are too fine, and then there was one that I think was mulch, i'm still not sure. And then there's the ones that are basically gravel -"
The man seems to have lost himself in his tangent, which perfectly masks the rapid-fire beeping now coming from Techno's station. Techno's almost certain that he's probably double scanned at least one bag by now, but he's scanning so fast he's probably missed one to make up for it by now. He severely wants this interaction to end.
"- and thats another reason i think beach sand is good, its got more of a taco shell crunch than a cracker crunch, so its easier to -"
"Your total is $532.59." He's almost certain he'll get some form of carpal tunnel in the near future, but that was a problem for Future Technoblade. Right now Present Technoblade just wanted Weird Beanie Guy™ and his sand to be as far away as humanly possible.
"Oh! Er, sorry about that. There you go!" the stranger says, swiping his card.
"Alright then, have a good night."
"You too!" Weird Beanie Guy™ replies before popping his earbud back in and pushing his cart away, humming something about Twitch chats and beds.
Before he leaves for the night, Phil stops him in the break room to congratulate him. Apparently he broke the company record for the most items scanned in two minutes.