I went to Tesco this afternoon to get some Innocent smoothie and a copy of The Independent. When I went to the paper-selling bit of the shop they had no copies of The Independent. They also had no copies yesterday and, thinking about it, didn't have any last Sunday either...
I went to the Customer Services desk and enquired as to whether they'd stopped stocking The Independent. 'Oh no mate,' says cheeky hung-over teen employee, 'we just can't sell you any.'
I gave him my best what-the-fuck face and enquired as to why this should be.
'Well, see, the guy that updates the codes in the admin department hasn't been in so the code can't be updated so we can't sell it to you,' says chirpy employee, as if it's the most reasonable explanation in the world.
'So,' says I, 'you have the paper but you don't have the ability to sell it to me?'
Employee looks sheepish and realising that I'm getting to the point where I won't even pretend to be civil about this ridiculous shit passes me on to his fellow employee and wanders off to do something more pressing that he's just remembered he has to do.
The upshot of it all is that Tesco, one of, if not THE, largest supermarkets in the UK thinks it's perfectly reasonable for someone to update the codes for a newspaper every single week ('See mate, every week you need a different code because it's a different date. You see?') instead of having the same code all the time and relying on the fact that the date is recorded by the date/time stamp of the fucking receipt! Someone will, apparently, telephone me in the week to give me some bullshit explanation for why someone can't manually sell me a newspaper without a specific code being assigned to it.
The world is getting stupider and it worries me more and more.
I went to the Customer Services desk and enquired as to whether they'd stopped stocking The Independent. 'Oh no mate,' says cheeky hung-over teen employee, 'we just can't sell you any.'
I gave him my best what-the-fuck face and enquired as to why this should be.
'Well, see, the guy that updates the codes in the admin department hasn't been in so the code can't be updated so we can't sell it to you,' says chirpy employee, as if it's the most reasonable explanation in the world.
'So,' says I, 'you have the paper but you don't have the ability to sell it to me?'
Employee looks sheepish and realising that I'm getting to the point where I won't even pretend to be civil about this ridiculous shit passes me on to his fellow employee and wanders off to do something more pressing that he's just remembered he has to do.
The upshot of it all is that Tesco, one of, if not THE, largest supermarkets in the UK thinks it's perfectly reasonable for someone to update the codes for a newspaper every single week ('See mate, every week you need a different code because it's a different date. You see?') instead of having the same code all the time and relying on the fact that the date is recorded by the date/time stamp of the fucking receipt! Someone will, apparently, telephone me in the week to give me some bullshit explanation for why someone can't manually sell me a newspaper without a specific code being assigned to it.
The world is getting stupider and it worries me more and more.