I was shopping in Sainsbury’s and becoming increasingly irritated by the swarms of old people in there. They were slow and dithery and getting in the way. One old lady stood for ages hovering her hand over the Hovis medium sliced loaves, deciding which one to take of the twenty identical packages on the shelf. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, with less deference to her advancing years than would have been proper in the circumstances and about which I felt slightly guilty afterwards. Two others were standing in the middle of the aisle, nattering over heaven knows what, and blocking it. You get the picture. Eventually I managed to negotiate the geriatric minefield without serious incident and put my shopping through the till. I presented my card to the machine and waited.
Now, it is a feature of the post-cash era that the system occasionally declines a presented card and requires that you insert it and enter your PIN. Only you don’t know that until an untypical length of time has passed because the card is obscuring the screen. Such a length of time was on the verge of expiring when the operator spoke.
What I would have expected her to say was something like: ‘It wants your PIN this time.’ But she didn’t. She said: ‘Now, what you need to do is place your card in that slot at the bottom…’ Sensing the patronising tone in her voice, I said: ‘You mean it wants my PIN this time?’ ‘Yes,’ she said, appearing slightly taken aback. And so I did it the old fashioned way and there were no wrecks and nobody drownded.
So there you have it. I nip around the store getting increasingly irritated by old people being slow and dithery, and when I get to the checkout I’m treated like a little old man. Maybe the checkout operator was just going with the flow and failing to make due allowance for the fact that not everybody who looks like a cross between Quasimodo and Golum has a failing mind to match. And so I put it down to instant karma and went home.
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