Forgive the terrible pun in the title, but I think the weekly shopping trip has broken my brain.

Today, we visited a major supermarket chain which shall remain Tesco. NAMELESS! I meant…oh, sod it. Anyhoo, off we popped to the shops for a few bits and pieces. In and out job. No big deal. Balls.

First up, the trolley. Why the hell can you never pull out just one trolley?
“I’ve got one. Oh, two. Well i’ll just…hmm. They’re wedged together. They’re bloody welded! ONE! I WANT ONE! ONE! ONE! NOT TWO! WHY ARE THERE THREE NOW!? WHAT THE…AIIIEEEEE!”
The “AIIIEEEEE!” was the moment when they separated suddenly and I flew out in front of a car and get knocked through that bloody annoying whirring sign thingy.

You know those signs, right? With the moving adverts that change JUST before you manage to read the price of the item that, for once, you’ve seen on an advert and would actually like to sodding buy. So you wait. And you wait. And…you get it. Then you get sick of it and walk away and BURRRRRRRRR it changes! You spin round and…toothpaste? No, it was a bloody frying pan!

So, I give up and head inside, not knowing the horrors that await! Like the vegetable section. One courgette, that’s all I wanted. One. Sodding. Courgette.
Oh, there are nets of them with three or four but I don’t need three. Or four. I want one. One courgette. So I have to take…a bag.
The bags are hung in a wee dispenser box thing which says “Please take one bag”. I WOULD LOVE TO! I would dearly love to take only the single bag which I require. But I can’t.

After half an hour of frantic scrabbling, looking for all the world like a squirrel trying to open a bag of peanuts, I take of my right shoe, then my right sock, bung the courgette in the sock and fling it into the trolley in a fit of despair.

Up and down the aisles we go. Trolleys crash into me. Old people knock me from side to side as they shamble down the aisles like the beige undead that they are. Chittering, cackling imbeciles exclaim over cut price loaves and elbow me in the ribs until I cough up sections of lung.

But then, oh blessed day, we’re finished! We can go to the…OH JESUS CHRIST IN HEAVEN NO! THE SELF-SERVICE CHECKOUT!
I know it sounds like a brilliant idea. No dealing with the Serving Ogre(TM), generally not much of a queue. But what you do have to deal with is The Bleeping Soul Destroyer(TM).

The machine which will NOT recognise the barcode on only the most embarassing of items, so this “Sharon to self-service, problem with haemorrhoid cream” goes out over the tannoy.

The machine which is refuses to accept your perfectly good five pound note again and again until it devours it whole and, I swear, lets out a series of beeps which sound very much like a giggle.

Oh yes, I hate that little beeping git. But nothing will drive me so surely into a fit of absolute rage as this:

UNEXPECTED ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA!

WHY WEREN’T YOU EXPECTING IT, YOU DIGITAL DIMWIT?! YOU JUST SCANNED THE SODDING THING! YOU GAVE IT A BLOODY GOOD GO-OVER WITH THAT BLINKING RED EYE OF YOURS ON THE SIXTEEN ATTEMPTS IT TOOK TO GET YOU TO RECOGNISE THE BARCODE! WHAT’S SO BLOODY UNEXPECTED ABOUT A BAG OF POTATOES! YOU SELL POTATOES! I DIDN’T DROP A SEVERED HEAD INTO THE BAGGING AREA, DID I!? THAT, THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN A BIT OF A SHOCK BUT THIS?!

I was busily trying to pry the front off of the machine with a toy hammer which I grabbed from the front of a Bob The Builder comic when security asked me to leave. On the whole, I thought it was for the best.