A robot wants to look at my testicles. At least I think that's what it said

And I only came here to buy a banana

Photo © 2025 Adrien Delforge

“Please wait while we verify your bags.”

Oo-er, sounds a bit rude!

In a Carry On film, they’d follow this up with “Ooh nurse, feel my pulse”. Or as Butthead might say: “Uh-huh-huh. You said ‘verify’. Uh-huh-huh...”

I am, of course, standing before a supermarket self-service checkout back in Blighty while the voice of a robot woman gives me the old nudge-nudge wink-wink. “Verify your bags,” indeed.

This is a refreshing experience for me as, back in France, the space reserved by supermarkets for their self-service checkouts remains a minority ghetto for the foolish and the impossibly optimistic. Subverting the mistranslated biblical allegory of the camel and the eye of a needle, it is quicker to get a trolley-load of groceries checked through on a conveyor belt by a human being than it is to self-checkout one banana.

Still, one must insist, eh? ‘Smart world’ and all that. I mean, if you refuse to put up with a few disadvantages of the smart world, what’s the point of it all that technology?

Actually, forget I asked that question. That way sanity lies. Let’s stay innovative, people!

In France, many supermarkets have given up with the robot voice that publicly shames me by yelling to all within earshot that I have thrust my “item” unexpectedly into her “bagging area”. Oo-er, sounds a bit rude (again)! So rude, perhaps, that the shops decided that installing robots that bleat 1960s Carry On sexual innuendos all day at their customers isn’t the best practice when you’re a quarter of the way into the 21st century.

This self-inflicted sabotage in reprogramming French self-service checkouts to shut the fuck up has led to some surprising results. In a certain number of cases, it has actually sped up the automated checkout process and shortened the basket-case, er I mean ‘basket-only’ queues.

Speaking for myself, the effect has been astonishing: since the beginning of the year, I have successfully managed to complete a purchase at such machines an incredible THREE TIMES without assistance – or without being led away by sympathetic paramedics, or being tasered and physically ejected from the store by a security guard.