Stories within a story

Life is full of stories. In just one day in my life I can come up with several different stories about people. Particularly in the job I'm doing now! I'm a checkout chick at a supermarket, but everyday I'm amazed at the many little stories that occur in people's lives. (This may be one of my reasons for my procrastination with my novel writing. There's so much detail, although it may be irrelevant for fiction writing.)

For example, today at work there was a man who was humming to himself the whole time while he was at my register! Okay so this is more like a mannerism, but there is surely a story behind how he came to always hum to himself whilst he is at the checkout!

When I worked at a bakery I once served a man who tried to pay for his purchase using keys- ordinary house keys. He said, "These should be worth something. How much can I get with them?"

He was elderly so he may have had amnesia but it was quite a strange occurrence at the time. I handed him over to another employee to sort out and eventually he handed over a $5 note for his purchases. That has to be one of the strangest stories that happened to me when I worked there though.

Other people will tell you the reasons why they are making a purchase, for example "We are having a party tonight" etc.

Even the smallest thing like going to the shops for half an hour can turn into a story about say... a person who tries to find a certain chocolate bar. They walk up and down all of the aisles in the supermarket until they finally ask an employee who tells them the chocolate bar isn't stocked anymore. Their reaction to this information can be the most interesting part of the story. They could either shrug this off and look for the product elsewhere, or they could complain to the employee about this and go on and on about why they should be able to find this chocolate bar or about their desperate struggle to find it and that if they can't find it how unfair it would be. This is a hypothetical story but these days shoppers aren't afraid to tell you what they think isn't fair.

But going to the shops is not the only story in people's lives. For example, last night I struggled a lot to get my printer to work. It still isn't working today. But my story didn't start from there. It started last night when I tried to submit my tax return. I was trying to lodge it over the Internet. This didn't work for some reason so I tried to print it out. That's when my printer trouble started and then my computer decided to slow down too. So in the end, one thing was leading to another and I finally decided to give up on the printer and computer for the night. This story isn't usually one you would find in a novel because it would distract the reader from the main focus point of the story. But I just thought it was fascinating how we can fit so many stories into our lives without giving them much regard!