I’ve had many jobs over the years – farm worker, writer, stylist for the Mandrell Sisters – but my latest occupational detour may be the most important of my life. Now I know most of you are thinking I was made for exotic dancing, but in truth I’ve decided to become a lobbyist.

Until recently I thought a lobbyist was someone who traveled from town to town hanging out in lobbies. Every lobby I’ve ever been in, there’s at least one person who seems to live there. Be it the DMV in Kinston or the Redd Foxx Museum in St. Louis, I’ve never seen an empty lobby. I often wondered how one made a living hanging out in lobbies. Then, someone gave me a word-a-day calendar for Christmas, which cleared the whole thing up.

Since the newspaper has gone the way of the Dodo and my modeling career is deader than a bag of hammers, I decided to try my hand at this lobbyist thing. It took me a while to get my bearings, but I’ve finally started to make headway on a very important bill currently in committee in the North Carolina Senate: a law that would force businesses who use self-checkout to give customers 5% off.

“This is definitely a bipartisan issue”, said NC Rep. Chris Humphrey. “Both sides of the aisle haven’t agreed on something this quickly since we voted to put money in the administrative budget for Moon Pie Mondays.”

“I despise going into a store like Lowe’s where they’ll have three employees standing around the self-checkout stations,” said Scott Devours of Kinston. “If you’re going to pay someone to stand there, why not have them operate a cash register? You have to walk halfway to New Bern to find a human cashier at the other end of the store.”

“If you’re going to save money by not paying someone to run the cash register, then the customer doing self-checkout should get a discount,” said Paulette Burroughs, a La Grange resident who once spent the night in a Food Lion in protest of self-checkout.

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“I’m not going back to prison because the store’s scanner missed a barcode on a bottle of Mad Dog,” Burroughs said. “They tried to make me do that self-checkout mess a few years ago and I refused. They started turning off the lights and waxing the floor like it was going to change my mind; I crawled up on a display of ‘Nilla Wafers and slept there until the store manager finally gave in the next morning.”

If the new law is signed by the governor, expect to see those folks who are getting paid to point you to a self-checkout station to actually have to start doing something by the fall of this year.

Jon Dawson’s books are available at www.Amazon.com.