Return of the Revenge of the Curse of the Bride of Self-Checkout Strikes Back II

Sorry my column is a little later than usual. By the time I was released with a caution by the municipal police, beer o’clock had long passed. So had most of Friday.

The day began peacefully enough: bright, sunny and not a hint of dark clouds – or handcuffs – in sight. I had, however, foolishly agreed to “fix” a colleague’s PC this morning. This colleague had been complaining to me the night before that their PC had suddenly begun to run like a slug for no good reason, and I equally inexplicably promised I would take a look. The promise was made towards the end of a press-only aperatif after a private viewing of an art exhibition in town, and I am ashamed to admit that I let my guard down.

It didn’t take long to work out what the problem was: he had a shit computer.

OK, maybe that’s a bit snobbish. He had an old computer. Most of it was in a big metal box on the floor.

I haven’t seen a tower system in yellowing ‘stone white’ for some years. This one had 1GB of memory in it, all the slots used up. There was a 3.5in floppy drive at the front. It had serial and parallel ports at the back. The only thing I couldn’t find was the ratchet key to wind it up.

When I quizzed my colleague on the “suddenness” of the deterioration in performance, he outlined a new definition of the word “sudden” that I had not encountered before. It seemed definitely slower at the moment, he said, than it had been when he bought it… or, as I surmise, when one of his ancestors had originally acquired it before the days before fiat currency, in exchange for two piglets and a sack of wheat.

What struck me most of all was the startup screen. It fascinated me so much, I took a photo of it: it’s the one you can see at the top of this week’s column.

Basically CHKDSK had been set to run before or while launching Windows; I can’t work out which because I wasn’t prepared to wait another two full moons before the fucking thing finished starting up. Maybe it was triggered by AUTOEXEC.BAT, I dunno, I’ll have to check some history books.

So what’s so striking about CHKDSK running on an ancient PC? Nothing, in principle. But it’s just that I had never seen CHKDSK like this before. It was weird to see the text made up of identically scaled letters and numbers in straight lines, and all visible in one go without having to move my head side to side to read it bending around the curvature of a CRT monitor. It was quite an odd experience.

Oh yes, he had a 2010 Dell flat panel display. He’d recovered it from a skip.

I told my colleague to stop being a stingey git and go buy himself a cheap laptop, or at least something that runs on mains electricity rather than a spindle turned by a nearby water mill. Warming to my theme, I overdid it a bit, singing the praises of customer tech modernity. He wasn’t happy with the advice and he didn’t offer me a second coffee, let alone a thank-you lunch. So I made my excuses and left, remembering to trigger a defrag as a parting present. That’ll keep it chundering until at least 2026, I reckon.

What I ought to have done, having nipped back home, was upload my column to Substack. But no, the little procrastinator genes ganged up on me as usual, whispering with a silky voice that I absolutely must do some unnecessary food shopping first. So off to the supermarket I went.

Since there was nothing I had to buy, I ended up at the checkout tills with a small bag of peanuts, a car-wash squeegee (good intentions etc) and eight Tetra Pack bricks of soya milk. As you do. Living the dream, me.

What I ought to have done then was put these items on a conveyor belt and let the supermarket cashier scan them through. Unfortunately, I was still in a fit of peak about the aforesaid “customer tech modernity” and did something I had sworn I would never do again as long as I live…

I queued up to use a self-checkout machine.

I have history with these buggers but by the time my previous bad experiences with self-checkout came back to mind – exactly one per visit, a 1:1 bad experience ratio – it was too late and it was my turn.

I inspected the hideous contraption at some length. Determining which was the bagging area as opposed to the area where you put your bags – two entirely different things, apparently – I began to sketch some diagrams in my notebook in case I needed them later.

Right, I thought, here goes. I passed the first brick of soya milk in front of the scanner. An upbeat and cheerful beep sounded from the hellish depths of the machine and a woman’s digitised voice told me to put the item in the bagging area. Simultaneously, an animated graphic on the touch-display demonstrated how humans pick things up and put things down, in case I had forgotten.

Astounding: it worked.

I beeped the second item through and put it alongside the previous one. Clucking bell, this actually works! I’m on a roll. Let’s do another!

Bluuuurt. The digitised woman told me to take the last item away. It was the squeegee: maybe it was too lightweight? I did as she asked and she immediately told me to put it back. Er, OK. I did as she commanded, whereupon she told me to take it away again. And so we continued with our improvised squeegee hokey hokey, back and forth for a minute or so until this happened:

If there’s one thing I learnt from a career in user-facing IT, it’s never to click on a button to dismiss an error message without a lawyer to witness it. There was something vaguely familiar yet oddly untidy about this one. Let’s take a closer look…

Ah, it’s that one: the self-service retail app had “encountered a problem and needs to close”. It’s untidy because French requires twice as many words as US English to say anything and has busted some of paragraphs onto extra lines.

I attracted the attention of the bored-yet-overworked minder sitting on a high swivelly stool at the self-checkout exit. She just shouted across at me to do as the machine was telling me. I tried a “Yes but…” and that just made her shout louder that I should take my item away from the bagging area, then put it back again. Great, now I had two women yelling at me simultaneously to put it in and take it out, while I stood there looking nonplussed, brandishing a squeegee. It was like being in a Robin Asquith film.

The non-digital minder jumped down from her guard post and showed me what I should have been doing – essentially what I had been doing – with no more success than me. I tried to point out that the on-screen error message had to be cleared before the system would do anything else but this just came across as mansplaining. So she femmesplained back to me: “Look, all you have to do is this…” whereupon she noticed the on-screen message.

Without a beat she pressed Don’t Send, inserted a key from her batbelt, typed a six-character unlock code, and then beeped the squeegee through. “There!” she concluded, “Like that! Do as the machine says!” before skipping back to her watchtower.

I passed the next soya milk across the scanner. Beep. And into the bag. Bluuuurt. A digitised voice told me to take it out, then put in back in again. “Excuse me,” I called over to the machine minder, “Can I borrow your key and passcode, please?”

She stormed back and snatched the carton of white beanwater from my hands. Looking in both bagging areas, she gazed at me incredulously, commented that I was buying a lot of soya milk and asked how many I had. She then did her key-and-passcode business, pressed in the number ‘8’ and informed me I could now pay. “And do what the machine says this time.”

A minute later…

“Er, excuse me?” She looked up wearily. Why did this ’omme ’orrible have to turn up while I was on shift, she must have wondered. “I’m trying to scan my customer loyalty barcode,” I whinged, “but it won’t do it.”

Without moving from her seat she yelled back that you can’t scan the barcode from the smartphone app; her tone of voice suggesting “Durr, thickhead, everyone knows that.” Yeah, everyone except the fucking developers of your fucking customer loyalty app, apparently, otherwise why the fuck does it have a fucking button to fucking show the fucking barcode on its fucking screen in the first fucking place?

Calm down, I told myself. Deep breaths. So I spent the next ten minutes calmly trying to punch my 27-character code into the greasy point-of-sale display, copying it with squinty eyes as the non-scalable barcode on my fucking useless customer fucking loyalty fucking app insisted on fucking showing my fucking customer fucking number at fucking 1.5pt. Fucking fuck diddly fuck.

I meant to thank the assistant sarcastically as I left but she unexpectedly brandished a cheap green plastic poker chip in my direction. Er, OK, that made me forget what I was going to say; I bet it would have been really smart, too. I pinched the chip daintily from her fingers, mumbled a merci and shuffled by.

Before I reached the main exit, my attention was grabbed by a large poster telling me I could win hundred of euros in supermarket discount vouchers. All I had to do was insert my magic purchase-token into the magic computerised winning machine located under the poster. There were photos of parsnips, cheese and wine. Like I said: living the dream, me.

Oh go on, why not? I dropped my magic, er, cheap green plastic poker chip into the slot.

I heard it clunk into a receptacle, then… nothing. What was supposed to happen? Was I supposed to tap something on the display? Well, let’s have a closer look at that display, shall we?

By the time the municipal police arrived, I had already freed the unit from its cardboard container and was sitting on the floor of the supermarket entrance surrounded by thermal printer parts in my attempt to clear the roll-feed jam.

My pleas of innocence and explanation that I was only doing as instructed on the screen went unheeded as I was carted off to the station.

I’ll order next week’s shopping by Chat GPT.