ALEX HICKEY | Culture
SURELY NOT??
A supermarket shopper has persevered through “the most stressful experience” of his life, agonising over if his house was burning down at that very moment.
It started off like any other Sunday afternoon shop for the aptly named Shaun Heatson.
But it all changed when he rounded the aisle to the canned goods section.
Seeing his usual three pack of spaghetti sticking out at him a third of the way down, he realised he might have left the oven on at home.
“I can remember finishing my spaghetti toastie, rinsing the plate and putting it in the dishwasher, but I wasn’t sure I switched the oven off. The more I thought about it, the more I thought I probably hadn’t. But it’s not exactly a memorable thing, so maybe I just forgot that I’d done it.”
Heatson’s shopping cart was half full at the time, and he didn’t want to abandon it for no reason. But neither did he want to stay out, risking razing his house to the ground.
“I was just trying to keep it together and get the shopping done as quickly as I could. I barged past a couple of ladies who were blocking the bread aisle and had to apologise. I really just wanted to start running.”
Making things worse, for the first time in his living memory, he needed to wait for the supermarket cashier to do a price check on an item that inexplicably wouldn’t scan.
As he waited, clenching his fists and impatiently shifting his weight from one foot to the other, he was haunted by visions of his home and his possessions going up in smoke, and worried if he could be criminally charged for negligence.
When he eventually did get home, the oven was off and the house was fine.
“Yeah, it was a bit of an anticlimax really.”
More to come.
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