Barring the code

I bought some printer ink yesterday. I know - rock and roll, eh? I had an urgent letter to print. Naturally the printer, which had been showing "zero ink" (a friendly black cross in an empty cylinder) for weeks, chose that particular day to start printing things as if intended for the spirit world (i.e. ghostly).

Nowhere nearby sells Lexmark cartridges, so I planned to drop by the PC World in Stockport on my way to pick Nikki up from work. During the journey I remembered that the evil Excel parking shysters had taken over at the Peel Centre (which used to be free for parking of less than an hour), and I'd come out without any coinage. Maybe I should risk dropping in at Staples, even though for the last couple of years they've never stocked the particular black ink cartridge I need?

Staples didn't have the particular black ink cartridge I need.

Off to Peel then. Risk another few months of illegal threats from Excel that they'll take me to court for the heinous crime of depriving them of their £1 for five minutes' parking, or pop along the road and pretend to be a customer of Dunelm Mill? The latter was the better option on this particular occasion, requiring a couple of minutes' extra walking in each direction. With the previous detour to Staples I was already running late and on arrival I discovered that this particular branch of PC World has had a complete refurb since my last visit and is now more of a Curry's - majoring in domestic appliances rather than computer frippery and having moved the ink to a completely different part of the shop. By the time I found it I was definitely late. I grabbed a couple of cartridge packets and headed for the till, but was beaten to it by a gentleman who would easily qualify for an ESOL course, with his undecipherable query about why he couldn't pay with the credit card he repeatedly waved under the nose of the till guy.

Was it my hopping from foot to foot, or my thunderous countenance that gave the till guy the clue I was in a hurry? Who can tell, but full marks to him for calling over an interpreter another operative to deal with ESOL so that he could attend to me. Only for some reason he found it impossible to scan my items.

Yes, well done Lexmark! A masterpiece of packaging design. Your plastic blister is smooth on five of its six surfaces, but inexplicably ridged on the side beneath which the ink cartridge packet has its bar code. The ridges diffuse, refract and reflect the scanner's laser light, rendering it completely incapable of actually reading the code. Till guy had to type it in. More delay.

He didn't spot that I had two of the same item either. So rather than entering "2x" of "this", we had to go through the rigmarole again: scan; fail; retry; fail; examine packet; retry with scanner at a different angle; fail; type the code in again.

I wasn't late, but it was close.

The letter didn't need printing in the end.