Unexpected Item In The Bagging Area

Due to a problem with her hip and the snowy, icy and all round slippery conditions outside, my grandmother hasn’t been leaving the house that much of the last four weeks. And, as happens when you stay in your house for four weeks, you begin to run out of essential items – bread, milk, tea…

And, being a good grandson who lives less than 23 seconds away from her front gate, I’ve called over almost daily to see if there’s anything she needed. When there has been, I’ve gone to get it from the supermarket located approximately four minutes away that shall remain nameless. Although anyone with half a brain has probably worked out which supermarket I’m talking about because of the nice big picture of its sign at the top.

Now, I don’t go to supermarkets often. When I do, I tend to buy odds and ends at a time of day when nobody else is in there. But when it was busy yesterday, I decided to brave the notoriously infuriating self-service checkouts. Nobody uses them and I can see why.

I had a bag of hash browns, a bottle of semi-skimmed milk and a loaf of thick cut white bread. All of them items are perfectly naturally found in a supermarket; there is nothing surprising about them.

So, I walk up to an empty machine, press a few buttons and I’m asked to scan my first item. I pick up the hash browns and move the barcode over the scanner. It bleeps.

The screen now patronises me by assuming I don’t know how to use a carrier bag and showing me a cartoon of a middle-aged woman with a small child placing an item into a bag, complete with colourful arrows.

I put the hash browns in the bag, confident in my abilities to put things in bags.

But then, rather loudly, the machine announces that there was an “unexpected item in the bagging area.” No there wasn’t. There was some hash browns in a bag that was still attached to the bagging area. That is, a bag of hash browns I had just told the machine I was going to place in the bagging area. So, by all accounts, the one word that couldn’t be used to describe the hash browns would be ‘unexpected’. And surely, anything that the supermarket stocks can’t be that unexpected… Granted, if I’d put a baby or a nuclear submarine in the bagging area, the machine might have a point, but I hadn’t, so it didn’t.

Of course, the machine wouldn’t let me continue scanning my items until the unexpected one was removed from the bagging area. So I pulled the hash browns out of the bag and waited to be allowed to carry on.

But, instead of being greeted with the list of items I had scanned – the hash browns – I was shown another graphic, this time of an empty bagging area. A moment later, the same voice announced that an “item has been removed from the bagging area.”

I know. I was told to do it.

So, I put the hash browns back, this time following the cartoon instructions on screen, just in case I had been putting an object into a bag incorrectly for the last 22 years. It turns out I had been, given that, this time, the machine allowed me to carry on.

Or so I thought.

I let go of the rapidly defrosting food and picked up the milk, ready to aim it at the scanner. But almost perfectly in time with the point I was about to connect the barcode with the laser, the screen flashed and the machine once again told me that there was an “unexpected item in the bagging area.”

It took me four attempts to put those hash browns in the bag correctly before the machine let me scan the milk. Oddly, it liked the milk and allowed me to move on to the bread immediately.

I did and I placed it into the bag.

“Unexpected item in the bagging area.”

It took all my strength for there not to be an unexpected item in the self-service checkout’s monitor.

I remove the bread: “Item has been removed from the bagging area.” So I replace the bread: “Unexpected item in the bagging area.” So I remove the bread: “Item has been removed from the bagging area.” So I replace the bread: “Unexpected item in the bagging area.”

And so it went on, until the adolescent I presume had been pissing his sides at the back of the self service checkout area came over and asked if everything was okay. I can only guess he’d have lost his job if he’d have allowed me to forcibly remove the machine from its fixed point and send it hurtling through the window in front of me.

He couldn’t get the bread into the bag either.

After 10 full minutes of fiddling he found what was in the bagging area that the machine didn’t like. And if you thought that an item stocked by the supermarket and, a second earlier, scanned by the machine being found unexpected was daft, wait until you hear what was in the bagging area that had upset the machine this time.

A bag.

How can a bag being in the bagging area be anything other than expected?

I can now understand and appreciate fully why nobody uses the bloody things. If ever there was a need for a product that was intended to do nothing but irritate the user, whoever was developing it wouldn’t need to spend a long time designing it.

They’d just need to go to bloody Tesco.

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