I went to our local Sainsbury’s supermarket yesterday morning, to do the weekly grocery shop.

At the Self Service checkout, I was randomly selected for a trolley scan.  “Helping you make sure you haven’t missed anything”, it said on the handheld device. Or words to that effect. Obviously, what it was really saying was “We’re checking that you haven’t nicked anything”.

As I don’t nick stuff, I wasn’t concerned.

I waited – with my red light flashing on the till – until the lone girl working that section (and totally run off her feet) eventually managed to get to me. “Sorry about this”. I said.

She smiled. “No problem. I just have to scan… ” – she looked at her handheld device – “… fourteen items”.  I had quite a trolley load.

She started scanning a few items.  “You need to scan the items at the bottom of the bags… that’s where I put the stuff I’ve nicked”, I joked. She threw a withering smile at me, having never heard that before.

By now, there were a couple more people awaiting her attention and so I decided I’d help, rather than just make sarcastic comments.  I passed her a few items from the  Pets At Home bag that I always pack the fruit and veg into… hey, everyone has their own system.  “These aren’t on the list”, she said, as she scanned the bananas that I’d just passed her.  I was a bit perplexed by this. How could that be?  And then I remembered that just as I had weighed the bananas and stuck the ticket on them, Mrs M had phoned me to ask if I could get some chicken, some mayonaise and some bread rolls for lunch. Distracted,  I’d obviously forgotten to scan the bananas.

“Oh, sorry about that. Can we just add the bananas retrospectively?” I asked, feeling a bit embarrassed, as the waiting customers were standing there watching what was going on and were probably assuming I was trying to nick the bananas.

She shook her head. “No, sorry, we can’t”.

“OK, don’t worry, we’ll put them to one side and I’ll buy them seperately”.

She shook her head again. “Sorry, but because it found an item that you hadn’t scanned in, we need to re-scan the entire trolley”.

WTF!

There was nowhere to do this, other than where we were standing, so right in the middle of the SmartShop section – in front of everyone – I had to empty all the bags out onto the floor, and then the girl scanned everything back in, one by one.  There were even more people waiting now and some were getting quite agitated because some bloody idiot had tried to steal stuff and had been caught, and he was now slowing everything down by monopolising the only check-out assistant in a five-mile radius.  I could feel daggers raining down on me as I bent over the bags, throwing stuff into them as quickly as I could. My system was in  complete disarray, with everything going into the wrong bags, but I didn’t care, I just wanted out of there.

After a few mins – which felt a lot longer, I can tell you – we were done and the new total was 46 pence higher than my original. Funnily enough, 46p was the price showing on the ticket stuck to the bananas.

I then had to do the walk of shame, past all these waiting people, pushing my trolley – with its obligatory squeaky wheel – past all these annoyed people.

One woman glowered at me as I walked past.

I smiled at her and shrugged my shoulders in an apologetic manner. “It was the bananas”, I said.

She didn’t smile back.