★ Inconvenienced

Pretend you’re me.

You’re about to embark on a jour­ney to the local super­mar­ket — the Canterbury branch of Morrisons — for the com­pon­ents of a pic­nic lunch. If you like, pro­nounce ‘pic­nic’ as Yogi Bear would: “pic-a-nic”. Just get some salad, some sushi, a couple of drink yoghurts, and you’re golden.

Ready? Set?

You cycle to Morrisons because you’re an idiot who doesn’t care about your phys­ical safety, and you laugh your way around the cars that try to park in spaces while you’re cyc­ling across them. This is a good start.

On your way into the super­mar­ket itself, you take a bas­ket. For your con­veni­ence, bas­kets are placed in stacks. At the bot­tom of the stack there is a com­edy bas­ket — i.e. an immov­able one — instead of a sim­il­arly shaped recept­acle that is clearly not a bas­ket, which would make it unam­bigu­ous whether or not there is a bas­ket avail­able — because that would be too easy.

As you con­tinue into the shop, you might con­sider hum­ming The Raiders March.

The metal batwing doors may — or may not — open auto­mat­ic­ally. To find out, you need to step towards them, shuffle back­wards a bit, and step towards them again. Think of it as a Cèleigh. If the doors turn out to be auto­matic, you’ll prob­ably walk through mim­ing an open­ing action with your hand, giv­ing the impres­sion that you think you have Jedi powers. If the doors turn out to be manual, you’ll barge through with a com­bin­a­tion of groin and bas­ket, caus­ing every­one who is feel­ing oranges to turn and look at you blankly.

Your route through the store will be a hellish zig­zag orches­trated by the inac­cur­ate signs that swing above the aisles. Let’s say you want to find some sushi. Should be with the other fish, right? Surely. Yon, there’s a massive counter of fresh fish! Next to it is a whole wall of pre-packed sal­mon, pilchards, and so on. So where is the sushi? About a quarter of a mile away, bey­ond the hate­ful metal batwing doors. Because that is the obvi­ous place for sushi — next to the newspapers.

Paranoia begins to build. You won­der if the most com­monly needed items are spaced the greatest dis­tance apart. And you’ll be pre­cisely cor­rect — at least, you’ll think you’re cor­rect. That’s what para­noia does.

Finally, you’ve found the ingredi­ents of your meek pic­nic lunch. Now you’ve got a choice of about fifty cashiers or six ‘auto­mated’ check-outs. Well, you only have about eight items, so it seems silly to queue with those people who are buy­ing enough to over­winter at McMurdo Sound.

So you approach the auto­mated check-outs.

Your first prob­lem is that the check­outs are arranged in a square and can be joined from either the out­ward side of the shop or the inward side. This means that two rival, seeth­ing queues have developed. The phrase ‘I’m sorry, but there’s a queue’ is repeated with increas­ing vehe­mence. Baskets are rattled in threat.

While queueing, you notice that one of the six auto­mated cashiers is broken. It’s never the same one. Perhaps the machine is on a break but lacks the phys­ical capa­city to go and have a cigar­ette by the wheelie bins with all the other staff. The ‘break time’ machine will show a Windows dia­logue box with only one option. That option will be some­thing like ‘Just accept it’.

You try to remain jolly as the people ahead of you get increas­ingly con­fused and frus­trated by the way the auto­mated cashiers don’t work. It soon turns out that Morrisons is using the word ‘auto­mated’ in the sense that means ‘you do it’. Groans and sighs can be used to attract the one staff mem­ber tasked with loiter­ing nearby. Wordlessly, she applies the same treat­ment to every ail­ment: she puts her key in the machine, gives it a sav­age twist, and resumes her nail bit­ing over by the cigar­ettes, one heel rest­ing on a com­edy basket.

You think it’s over when you reach the auto­mated cash­ier. It is not. The sign above says ’15 items or less’. It quickly becomes clear, how­ever, that unless these items are TicTacs, you have nowhere to put your items on the spe­cially provided, uniquely small ‘inbox’ plat­form. You’ll need to put your bas­ket on the floor and pre­tend you’re in the gym, doing a stand-crouch rep for each of your items.

Stupidly, you care about the envir­on­ment and you’ve brought a can­vas bag to use instead of the plastic ones provided. Talk about fool­ish­ness — for when you put the bag on the ‘out­box’ plat­form, the com­puter bleats ‘You haven’t scanned it! Alert! He hasn’t scanned it!’ and you real­ise that the bloody thing works by weight. It thinks that you’ve stolen the TicTacs. Still, you grunt and sigh and the word­less mem­ber of staff comes over and assaults the machine with her key and the machine stops bleating.

All that’s left to do is scan your items. Impishly, the sur­face of the out­box is covered by a wadge of Morissons plastic bags, which can­not be removed because they’re skewered to a metal frame. It turns out that a sur­face com­pris­ing layered plastic bags is second only to spher­ical Buckminsterfullerene in its fric­tion­less prop­er­ties. So any­thing you put on it — like, I don’t know, say, your bloody shop­ping — slides around like an air hockey puck, only every edge is the goal.

That’s OK. You cope with it. You half lie across the pile and try to main­tain this pos­ture as you do another rep in the Morrisons gym, scan­ning your next item using your foot. But you can’t seem to get the bar­code to scan. Hmm, you think. Why not? You scan the item about sixty, sev­enty times before you real­ise that the com­puter is not happy — has issues with, is uncom­fort­able about — the fluc­tu­at­ing weight of the tee­ter­ing pile of shop­ping in the out­box. Instead of com­mu­nic­at­ing using that crazy, old-fashioned thing we call an error mes­sage — ‘Hey, bucko, quit lying on the frickin’ out­box’ or some­thing sim­ilar — it just does noth­ing and pre­tends not to read the next item.

You relax. Of course! You remem­ber that Morrisons is using the word ‘auto­mated’ to mean ‘you do it’. Everything is fine. After all, the idea of auto­mated cashiers has only been around for about thirty years, and it makes sense that, in 2009, they should still be this piss poor.

You go home and weep over your sun-dried toma­toes and curse the very day you decided on a pic-a-nic lunch.