Technology techschmology

I really like the idea of self-service checkouts. Not for huge loads of groceries perhaps, but for small baskets and getting lunch and so on I think they’re a really good idea. When they’re not such a good idea is when, for whatever reason, they don’t work properly.

I was in M&S today. I picked up about half a dozen items; drink, sandwich, crisps, a paper, and then headed for the checkout. Seeing there was a queue and wanting to break the mould that English people are for some reason attracted to standing in lines, I veered away to the empty self-service checkout.

Firstly, I was accosted by the M&S employee handling the machines. “This is stupid” I thought, “it’s ‘self-service’ – what is the point if I have to have a conversation with an employee anyway? Aren’t these machines supposed to save time?” I’d been starving hungry for the previous half an hour (evidently Crunchy Nut Cornflakes do NOT keep hunger locked up til lunch) and my temper was short. I was curt with her and having explained in clipped syllables that I understood that I had to pay by card rather than cash, she buggered off and left me to my business. I blipped through my sandwich and so forth. Unfortunately when it got to my copy of The Guardian it asked me to enter the cost, and then informed me to wait for assistance.

How complicated can it possibly be to type in the cost of a paper when the cost is written on said paper? Obviously, I had to be confirmed by the employee to make sure I wasn’t trying to buy it for 10p (which, in retrospect, was a lot more than it was worth), and this meant that the woman I had already been rude to had to come back over and help, and as a result talked to me as though I was mentally challenged. I probably deserved it for being so surly, for strutting in there with my “I can work this simple piece of technology” attitude and then being foiled by a system that doesn’t even know how much it’s newspapers are worth.

Anyway, I’m not doing that again. I could do without short, ugly old women getting one up on me, particularly when my blood-sugar level has sunk into the red. Still considering the fact that I paid nearly £3 for a sandwich, you’d have thought that Marks could meet expectations by creating a self-checkout that actually saves time, rather than wasting it. Another time, in another shop with an equally useless, I recall the machine informing me there was an "unexpected item in bagging area". How unexpected could an item in the bagging area possibly be? It's not like someone had just whipped their cock out.

Just another example of how simplifying the system has overcomplicated it yet again. I despair.