I could never work at a supermarket check-out.  I would be so slow.  The queue at my check-out would stretch back to the cereals aisle or, since queues have a habit of self-regulating, my end-of-day figures of number of customers served would be the lowest in store.  I wouldn’t last a week.  The problem?  I can never find the barcode on anything.

Such is my ineptitude, it is almost a skill.  Like most things in Life, there is a circle in operation here.  It is just that I have yet to discover an advantage to being the worst person at finding the barcode on a product.  Maybe the advantage is never having to work at a supermarket?

Give me a carton of six sides with a barcode printed on it, and I will circulate that hexahedron through at least a dozen turns before I discover it.  Normally by accident.  Find me at the barcode scanner of a self-service check-out, and I will be seen to be performing a complicated juggling act in order to get the correct side of my purchase in front of the scanner’s beam.  That self-congratulatory ‘blip’ when alignment is achieved remains an affirmation eternally elusive to me; or, at best, only ever hard won.

And yet for others this skill appears effortlessly; instinctive.  Blip; blip; blip; blip.  Where am I going wrong?

Pure probability would predict better results than I ever achieve.  Transport that famous monkey sat behind a typewriter to a self-check-out till and it would manage to purchase a dozen bananas quicker than I ever can.

Perhaps I have an in-built mechanism, which is biased against making a purchase?  It is actually a survival technique, designed to keep money in my pocket.  Giving me time to think and re-evaluate.  Do you really want to buy that?  Do you?  Do you really?

Do you really?

Blip.

© Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree is unfeasibly pleased when he achieves a… blip.