Unexpected Item in the Bagging Area

Clive had spent nine hours that day on an IT helpdesk, and in those nine hours he had said the same sentence to forty-one different people. He hated it, because he knew how much it annoyed them, and he had sworn that nobody would ever say it to him. At 11:50 that night, with his daughter's bake sale starting at eight the next morning and not a gram of flour in the house, the supermarket was ten minutes from closing.

He ran in, grabbed flour, sugar, eggs and a cake tin, and headed for the only staffed till. It was closed. That left the self-checkouts, a row of six cheerful screens of which, he would later discover, only one was actually working.

The flour went through without a hitch. The sugar, too. Then he put his own shopping bag down to free his hands, and the machine came to life. "Unexpected item in the bagging area," it announced, in a voice so calm it bordered on smug. Clive picked the bag up. "Please place the item in the bagging area." He put the flour back down. "Unexpected item in the bagging area." Had he been less tired, he might have found it funny.

The eggs were worse. Each time he scanned them, the machine insisted they weighed more than eggs should, as though he were trying to smuggle out a second box hidden inside the first. The cake tin, it seemed, did not exist at all. By 11:56 he had scanned it nine times, and a small queue of night-shift workers had formed behind him, sighing in a way that suggested they had been there before. Clive was at the end of his tether. He leaned towards the screen and, keeping his voice low, began to reason with it.

It was at that moment that the screen froze completely, and a light above it began to flash. Out of the back of the shop came a woman in a green apron, pushing a mop and bucket. Her name badge said Bernadette. She looked at the frozen screen, then at Clive, then at the eggs, with the patience of someone who had seen it all before.

"Right," she said kindly, reaching for the switch at the back of the machine. "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"