Heart attack

Monday, February 28, 2011

Self-Service Slip-Up

I had to go shopping today. It's not particularly bright and sunny today, rather wet and overcast. I had intended going to get my hair cut, but the thought of waiting in the hairdressers and the fact that it was decidedly chilly, once I'd parked the car and got out, I made up my mind not to get my hair cut. It can wait for another day, when it will be a little warmer.
Carol and I went into Milton Keynes shopping centre on Wednesday and went into Waterstone's. There is currently a series on BBC2 called "Faulks On Fiction", presented by the author Sebastian Faulks, in which he goes through genres of fiction, from "The Lover," "The Villain", "The Hero" and "The Snob" (not necessarily in that order.) and mentions quite a wide selection of novels. Also, at 6.30 each evening, on the same channel, there is a show called "My Life In Books" where Anne Robinson (she of "Weakest Link" fame.) talks with various well-known people about their favourite books. Where this is leading is that Waterstone's bookshop has most of these books on offer and many are in their  current 'Buy two, get one free" selection. We chose our books but I went back to buy them this morning. They are: "On Day" by David Nicholls, "Minding Frankie" by Maeve Binchy and ""Right Ho, Jeeves!" by P.G. Wodehouse (the one I choseas I'm a fan of Wodehouse and love the Jeeves stories.) We had gone into "The Works" the discount bookshop, which just happens to be next door to Waterstone's in the shopping centre and I saw a fantastic book in there on The Mona Lisa, reduced in price from around £35 to £4.99. It's really detailed on this iconic painting by one of my heroes, Leonardo DaVinci, everything about it you can possibly imagine, so I had to get it. That shop has some amazing bargains, and if you don't snap them up immediately then they're gone for good, which is why I got this book. There is one problem, though. It's such a large book I'm not sure where I'm going to keep it as it won't fit in any of our book shelves, unless I rearrange things considerably.

I then went to Lidl to do some shopping. I found that I needed a £1 coin to be able to use one of the shopping trolleys, and, as I didn't have any change on me, I decided to go to Tesco's and get £10 out of the cashpoint. I went into Tesco and bought today's Guardian newspaper. Instead of going to a human cashier to pay I made the mistake of using one of the self-service machines. When it came to pay, the machine tells you to choose your method of payment and I pressed 'cash' and then was supposed to put my £10 note into the machine, but for some reason best known to myself I managed to put the note into the slot meant for coupons. Which is why nothing further happened, so I stood and waited for the thing to respond, which it didn't. I then pressed the screen to ask for assistance and then someone appeared. It would appear that I'm not the first customer who's put cash in the slot meant for coupons. Well, it would be more sense if the machine had a flashing arrow to show where to put the money. I just felt a bit foolish making such a simple mistake. It then meant I eventually got my change, after the staff member opened the machine and retrieved my £10 note and I put it in the correct slot!

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