The location was Annandale Water Services, on the A74(M). I saw, in the men's toilets on the wall above the urinals, the following notice:
Please do not put litter into the urinals as it causes blockage and flooding
What I thought peculiar was the author's need to explain to us dumb fucks what the end result would be. I have never really considered putting anything into a urinal other than urine, but clearly there must be some delinquents who take one look at a urinal and think it's a white Brabantia kitchen bin, gasping to be filled with litter. I left the vicinity without being tempted to provoke a blockage or flooding or both by stuffing a burger box into the porcelain trough, and considered why Kirsty thought it necessary to put her name at the bottom of the homemade but neatly typed notice.
Back on the motorway, overhead I read the gantry sign that declared:
Fuller Cars, Less Queues
I of course thought the person setting up this digital sign was a thick cunt, because apart from the advice being fucking obvious, I was unimpressed with the grammar. Fewer Queues or Shorter Queues would both have worked, or Less Traffic would have been acceptable.
Fuller Shit, That's Me would have been a more amusing sign.
Later on, in Asda, I was perplexed by the newly designated channels within the self-checkout area. It used to be the case that the self service option was for customers with hand baskets. That takes the guesswork out of it because a basket is a fucking basket. A cunt with a trolley is clearly in the wrong place. However, it now seems that there's room for variation. Some pay points were marked Just a Few Items, while others had next to them a sign saying About 20 Items or Less.
So, what's a few? Who will police the customers to advise on the crossover point between the tills. 'Few' is not an exact term. Just a few, or quite a few? Apparently 'a few' means more than two, but less than several. By definition, therefore, a customer with two items (a couple of items) could not use the 'Just a Few Items' pay point because he or she would have one item too few, or expressed differently, be one item short. Instead, he or she would have to queue for the other pay point which clearly allows less shopping than that which is made up of 20 items or fewer. Meanwhile, people in that queue might be scanning 30 items, because what does the tolerance extend to on 'About 20' Items? The 'Less' should be 'Fewer'. At what point would fewer than 20 constitute 'Just a Few', I wonder? I suspect the person with 9 items will be perplexed and confused, wishing to God someone would help decide which queue should be joined, and wishing for the old system of 'Hand Baskets Only' or the mis-named '9 Items or Less' checkout (although that was manned/womanned, and not self service). On a tangential note, I used to wonder why 'Hand Baskets' were mentioned, as I have never seen any other type of basket in use at a supermarket. Chicken-in-the-basket is reserved for 1970's restaurants, and people don't these days tend to have on their person a wicker basket - though if so, it would still probably qualify as a 'hand' model, and not a communal skip. It's not as if pallbearers will be shopping together and turn up with a massive and long basket balanced on their shoulders and full of shopping! So, 'Hand' was never necessary.
It's all a slippery slope, because very soon there will be the option of scanning a trolley-load of shopping. This system would mean no need for checkout operators, just the same number of twats required to stand and watch you do their job for them, and then, when you buy a DVD or razor blades or a knife, or a paint scraper or rolling pin, or toothpick, they can step over and enter a code into the machine to authorise your purchase of an offensive weapon or subversive material.
Madness.
...
No comments:
Post a Comment