The Self-Checkout Incident

So I'm at the grocery store using self-checkout because I hate human interaction, right? I scan my bananas, and the machine goes "UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA."

I remove the bananas. Put them back. Same message.

The attendant comes over—the exact human interaction I was avoiding—and she just stares at the screen, then at me, then back at the screen. Finally she says, "Did you... scan the bananas as bananas?"

"Yes?"

"These are plantains."

We both look at my hand. They're definitely plantains. I've been buying plantains for three weeks thinking the store just had really firm bananas.

She voids it, I scan them correctly as plantains, and the machine immediately screams "UNEXPECTED ITEM" again.

She sighs. "Yeah, it does that with plantains. They're too heavy. The system thinks you're stealing a watermelon."

So now there's a line of five people watching this woman manually override the system so I can buy the wrong banana.

I grabbed my receipt, looked her dead in the eye and said, "I'm going back to regular checkout."

"We all do," she whispered.