h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The self-service tills only work if you have bags of no weight whatsoever, which is useless as if I'm outside then I usually have my backpack, which contains a selection of things I'll find useful when outside my house. But if you put the backpack on the scales and press 'brought own bag' the checkouts declare it is an unexpected item.

<BB<

Some supermarkets now have reusable mesh bags for fruit and veg. Once the bag is scanned at the self service till it has to stay in the bagging area. This means it has to be emptied of its fruit or vegetables. Only after the fruit or vegatables are weighed can they be added once more to the mesh bag. Its not exactly an efficient system.

People absolutely hide items with out "beeping" them. It's so bad, several large retailers (in the US) like Target & Walmart are cutting back on their self serve checkouts because of rising costs of theft.

Things may be a little bit different here. You bleep the items from your basket to your own bag. Fruit and veg that needs weighing can be weighed separately to get a barcode sticker. Bakery items with a piece price have a lookup table.

And yes, people steal stuff around here as well. Recently, someone got caught paying just one item out of 1000 euros in groceries. If you just forget one item, you will be listed but you will be banned only after multiple fails. This brings me to another

PH: supermarkets where the price on the till is higher than advertised in the shop. Independent research has shown that this is so common that it is hard to believe it is an error.

The scan as you go has shown that more carrots are sold than the shop has in stock, whereas the expensive veg stay on the shelves...

I hate having a service check - they only scan a few items in each of my bags, but somehow they manage to upset my carefully packed arrangement. Because I reuse bags, they managed to scan an old sticker once. When I pointed that out, they had to start all over again.

New PH: I'm happy to 'manage my account' online - when there's actually a webpage to do it. Spent ages looking for one on Octopus. Emailing them, got a speedy response but was sent a weblink which took me to an empty page. No response since.

That is weird about the blank webpage

Also annoying indeed when staff upset careful packing systems.

Today's PH: having different prices for different parcel sizes. My current box is well within the width and length measurements for a small parcel (10cm to spare each way), but it is 16.2cm deep and the limit is 16cm so it will be classed as a large parcel

Maybe you could sit on it to lose those extra 2 mm?

It was tempting, but I decided not to chance it - I found an option that was only a few more expensive and went with that

I've recently discovered a new petty hate.

Why can't you take the spray arms of dishwashers apart? The hours (!!!) of my life I have spent bashing the things at an angle trying to knock out a piece of eggshell, lemon pip, chunk of food, etc etc and to get into drop out of the tiny hole in the middle.

This despite my best efforts to remove the things that have the potential to clog up the spray holes whilst loading the dishwasher.. My hands are smarting at the thought of all that plastic bashing against them.

Surely they could be made just to clip together rather than be sealed units.

My PH today is a double one:

A. Alarm cords in accessible toilets that are too easy to trigger by accident, eg by the door or wrapped around a handrail

B. Alarm reset buttons that are set really high on the wall so disabled people eg wheelchair users can’t turn the alarm off when it has been accidentally triggered. I have no clue why installers think it needs to be really difficult to stop the alarm ringing.

My PH today - wanted to log on to banking, but phone battery run down so can't get passcode. My own fault, should have checked phone, but I have very little need to use it these days.

Another online PH: Filling in a form (having to look up details eg NI number) then the site crashes/says service not available right now/ similar fault. The time wasted, filling in data umpteen times.

Gah - yes, that happened to me today, too...