Maybe I missed my calling as a checkout operator, but I can manage to scan, bag, and pay for my entire order while most people are still irretrievably flummoxed by the indecipherable gibberish emitting from some unknown fount of mystery. What mysterious incantations send them into a whirl of befuddlement? “Please put the item in the bag”.

Why is this hard? Why do people stand, heads cocked like the RCA Victor dog, as the machine plainitively begs, “please put the item in the bag”? What is the incomprehensible element here? PUT THE ITEM IN THE DAMNED BAG. Some move the items in slow-motion, like they’re bagging priceless crystal; others, thinking the machine must yearn for a closer connection to the products they’re buying, forcefully mash the product into the scanner without actually moving the UPC in relation to it.

Why. WHY? If I were the poor bastard tasked with the UI focus groups on those things, I would have been committed by now. Almost all the users stab indiscriminately at the screen, not reading, not listening, in a sort of doe-eyed daze, before being rescued by the supervisor who now has to run four lines instead of one.

Is the 9/11 “truth” movement too mundane for you? Are you incapable of dealing with mountains of clinical research that says childhood vaccines have precisely dick-all to do with autism? Do you fail to recognize that a chemical compound *made* from a element is *not the same* as that element by itself, demonstrating a lack of even middle-school level science understanding? (God help them when they find out that table salt has chlorine in it.) Do you think Jenny Mccarthy is a deep fountain of scientific knowledge? Then you might be the idiot that left a card in my shopping cart, advertising DVDs that propose to tell me all about how vaccines are evil. Yeah. Good luck with that one. Oh, and good luck dying of measles. Dumbass. I’m not including the link – I’m not sending her stupid, pre-fab MLM site any more ad revenue.