Last Friday, after a busy week, I was looking forward to one of my truly simple pleasures of going home from work, getting a stubby and sitting on my garden bench to play catch with the dog.

That would appear boring to some, but it’s just gold to me. As it was, the night ended up anything but boring.

The first mistake I made on my arrival home was complaining about a sore throat and a slight headache and the fact that we hadn’t bought the olive leaf extract that someone had told me worked like magic.

Old mate seized on that like a dog on a bone.

“The health food shop up the road will be open and I’ll come with you as I have to pick up a few items from the supermarket,” she said.

Now at this stage I was slightly suspicious, but I was so keen to get rid of the flu symptoms that it pushed me over the edge and I agreed.

Dressed in an outfit that Jackie Onassis would have been proud of (in the ’60s of course), old mate declared that she wasn’t going to get changed.

She obviously was seizing the moment. Of course when we got there the health food shop was shut, surprise surprise. Of course Woolworths wasn’t and the trap had been sprung.

Now this particular shop at Currimundi has had a facelift, so old mate got quite disheartened when she couldn’t find anything.

It didn’t help that she had accidentally brought her to-do list instead of the shopping list, although it did remind her that I hadn’t changed that light bulb in the kitchen.

As we wandered aimlessly, another shopper suggested that we look at the end of each aisle, as there is a list there that tells nuffies like us what aisle particular items are in.

Sadly, there was no magnifying glass attached so we could read it.

Of course the statement “a few items” should have clearly been “I need everything in the joint except a few items”.

Finally we were finished but not before I had been sprung looking at my watch a couple of times, as 7.30 footy was rapidly approaching and my headache was being exacerbated by the verbal abuse I was receiving for not looking enthusiastic.

The following words changed my whole night: “Let’s try the self-serve check-out.”

I tried to point out they were probably only for people with baskets, not trolleys stacked to the brim, but she wouldn’t have it.

This new system involves a scanner, a screen, a robot voice that sounded like she was hired after a Terminator movie, and a shelf about as big as a glove box in a mini.

There are also red and green lights, as apparently you can only take the item away when the light goes green – something that took the robot a while to punch into us.

I mention the shelf because quickly it filled up, so we had to put all our stuff on the floor around us.

We got some human assistance when the robot clearly got sick of telling us the same thing over and over again, and eventually we got through to the last item.

As the crowd gathered around the clearly demented woman in the old tracksuit, and the dumb arse with her and their pile of stuff all over the floor, I will always remember what happened next, to my dying day.

There she was, trying to scan one little white mushroom, with me asking did she think the farmers grew them with a barcode on them.

Through tears of laugher, she explained that she had thought the machine would take a picture of it, and then weigh the rest in the bag.

The young lady who had been trying to steer the crowd away from us, explained that if you push a certain button it will show you pictures of fruit and veg and then you follow the prompts.

As me and Elvis left the building, I was terrified that the scanner would go off and we would be arrested for shoplifting, but there was nothing except for the sound of muffled laughter.

I wasn’t sure whether it was coming from the onlookers, the scanner or the voice of the robot checkout chick, as we probably paid for most of the items twice.