Vent-A-Spleen: Self scanners and those who can not operate them

If you will, I wish to steer this blog in a completely different direction and "vent-a-spleen".  Today my rant is about the greatest gift to shoppers in the last 25 years - the self scanner - and those creatures of God's beautiful dominion who are too stupid to operate them.

Once again, my pets, I was at my local grocery store - "Shopmore"  ("Where you shop for more because their's more to shop!") and I found myself the other day behind a couple who was moving too slow and while having too much difficulty operating the scanner.

They would pass the item over the scanner and place it on the belt but the belt wouldn't move.  Why?  Because instead of scanning the bar code on the package on junk food they were buying with their food stamps, they were scanning the NAME OF THE PRODUCT.  And I thought to myself, who in the fuck is that stupid?

"But wait" - as they say in the Shopmore ads - "there's MORE!"  Over comes the beleaguered employee who points out to them the bar-code and shows them how to scan the bar code correctly.  Then he guided them through scanning a package correctly and then he left to put out another fire, or save another lost shopper from drowning in a sea of technology.

And once again the people in front of me fucked it up.

Why?  Well Evidently these folks were not ENTP's because they certainly didn't learn from listening, and they didn't learn from doing, so they were either at a loss because there was no written instruction for them to review, or they were really hoping they could free-form and improvise.   Either way, their sour cream and bacon chip dip wasn't headed down the grocery belt-line where it would no doubt get to know the box of Bugles that were all ready down with the bag of Funyons.

So again, another employee had to come over there are stand there and scanned for them while these two people (wearing Eau d' Ashtray body spray) watched agog, when they were not not snapping at their Keisha's*.  For good measure, and so that we would know that they were there, the Mr.opened the bugles and tossed the box lid on the tile floor.

So my question is, evidently, what in the name of goodness sakes would make these two society drop out/crackheads think that they could run a u-scan at the Shopmore?

My second question is where is my gold-star for not calling them complete retards in the first place?  Anyone?  Anyone?

So my point is, why do these people try to do things that they are unable to grasp?  My rational sense replies that if they knew that they had no business operating this self-check out thing, that they wouldn't have attempted it, thus:

"Tyrone, we do not have any idea how that self-check out works, so lets go over to cashier number 7."

But now, it probably went down like this:

"What dat?"  And so the magic moment starts.

But I'm sorry, if you are so fucking stupid that you don't know how it works keep away from it!







*whose names were Ty-Keisha and SuKeshia ("Tykeisha!  You keep this up and you and Sukeisha going have to go to bed because I can't deal with you all.")