A Tale of Pride and Punishment

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I went to the Safeway yesterday, to buy some laundry soap. As I neared the check out stand, with soap in hand I saw that a set of self serve check out stations had been installed since my last visit. Though the express lane adjacent to the self serve stations was without a line, I stepped boldly and confidently and I might say even a little smugly past a customer who was getting help from a young Safeway employee to the self serve station beyond. I after all, had done this before, at the Home Depot. You already know the outcome of course. Of the two possible outcomes, success or failure, only one would make a story.

I can’t remember with any precision the individual steps of this particular humiliation. I believe it was at about the fourth screen that the first expletive slipped softly from my lips. I think that was what brought the young lady to my side, she with her lightening fingers, her ever so patient voice and her magic all-purpose plastic card that swipes away the work of the uninitiated and incompetent. I know she was with me for about twice the time it would have taken her to ring up my soap at a check stand. I know there was reversal of the charge for the second, phantom, bottle of detergent that I had somehow recorded. I know she left me with the words, “There, now just blah, blah, blah.” I know the last screen, the one that I turned my back on to make my way to the still empty express lane, said “Continue your transaction at the pin pad.” It wasn’t that I didn't know what a pin pad is, or couldn’t find it. I think I had that. It was that I had no idea whatsoever what I might do in order to continue. I find that in order to continue at a pin pad it is necessary to have at least some vague idea what to do in order to continue.