Tesco Checkout Hilarity.

Last night's last minute shopping needs were: three beers, half a pound of butter, red wine vinegar. So I was sent.

Easy shopping and I spotted a checkout with a girl just finishing a customer so I joined her queue only to be told, sorry love, I'm shutting. She must have been less that 18 and still called me love - Kent/South London, you have an awful lot to answer for!

So I move off, muttering about why can't these wankers put up the Till Closed sign, looking for another till.

I was shortly to find out why they don't put the signs up, and in the most enjoyable way.

I found a checkout and dumped my five products and placed the basket in the hole below.

The present customer had half a line of stuff so I was not going to be needed anytime soon so I went to check my email.

He called out, to me (and this is verbatim) 

"Excuse me mate, tell the next person I am shutting"

That was it, no please, no thank you, nothing!

So of course while he was busy scanning I moved my previously widely spread stuff up so another customer, a woman, could load her nearly full basket onto the belt.

He'd been a little preoccupied and so had not seen her, however when he did finally look up, here is the conversation that ensued:

Him to me: "I told you I was shutting!"

Me: "Yes"

Him: "But now you let her in as well!"

Me: "Well let me tell you, if I may, your cunning plan to shut was beset, from the very start, by two fatal flaws."

By now I had his, the woman in front of me, and the new woman's attention, and so I carried on.

Me: "Both are assumptions on your part. One, I am not a Tesco employee and if I ever reach s stage in my life where I have to become one, I will come here and kill myself by head-butting a till. Two, you mistake me for someone who gives a shit!"

As he was reaching for the panic button I added:

Me: "Now, were you to have asked me to do your job, with the degree of politeness due to a paying customer, I might have helped."

And there I stood until he scanned my goods and I came home.

Tesco, you really have become the shoddiest of all retail outlets.