Ben Madilynn
Three days ago, I walked into a pharmacy. The security guard handed me a priority number. He didn’t ask which type I wanted: senior/PWD/pregnant or just the regular one. He didn’t ask. And I didn’t say. Because, from experience, it didn’t matter.
I’ve been doing these pharmacy runs monthly for my parents for more than a decade. I knew that the pharmacists would still serve senior purchases even with a regular priority number.
There would usually be more personnel attending to the regular customers and just one or two serving the seniors moving at snail’s pace. But as I could never really tell which queue would be shorter, I always thought it pointless to specify which type of priority number I wanted.
Whatever I got, I would learn to live with, I figured. It was almost as if I wanted this decision to be taken out of my hands because I was afraid I’d make the wrong one. Coward’s way out. Let fate decide.
I knew the security guard had handed me a priority number under the regular category but I wanted to go with fate.
Scanning through the throng inside the pharmacy, however, I realized there was a long queue for regular customers and by some stroke of a miracle, there were only a few seniors seated inside the pharmacy and all had already been served.
I decided to ditch fate.
I walked to the security guard and asked for a senior priority number. He looked me up and down a few times, didn’t say anything but didn’t give me anything, either. He seemed to be challenging me to prove my senior status.
“I’m a senior,” I told him, “I accepted the regular priority number you gave me earlier because I thought the senior queue would be longer,” I explained further.
He continued to look at me in silence.
“I really am a senior,” I told him.
Finally, he spoke. “But you don’t have a senior ID,” probably trying to call me out on my supposed bluff.
“But, I do,” I told him.
He didn’t seem entirely convinced but he stopped short of demanding proof of my senior status. And I stopped short of flashing the proof in his face. Eventually, he handed me a senior priority number.
And off I went to the counter, telling the staff, a few of whom were familiar with me, my skirmish with their security guard. They just laughed.
“It’s because you don’t look like a senior, Ma’am,” they told me.
A senior gentleman nearby chimed in, “Well, at least, you were mistaken for a non-senior when you’re actually a senior and not the other way around.”
“Why didn’t you just flash your senior ID for proof?” my sister asked me later.
Well, my ID was already neatly attached by a binder clip to my senior booklet and prescription in a plastic envelope inside my bag and I just wanted it to lie undisturbed in its pristine state till presentation at the counter.
Looking back, that would have been the definitive proof of my age.
But on second thoughts, I really could just have whipped the mask off my face. And that would have shown definitive proof of my age.
