self served

I loathe the self check-out line. And the place that irritates me the most as far as the self check-out line goes is Home Depot because 90% of the time they don't give you another option. Checking out at Home Depot would be about 5 times faster if someone did it for me in a regular old check out line. And I hate that the call it the "express lane." There is nothing express about some calm machine lady voice bitching at me that there is an "unknown item in bagging area" when she was the one who just told me to "place item in bagging area." Besides, it was a friggin shelf that wouldn't fit in the stupid bagging area to begin with. And the person watching over the self check-out just stares at you while you struggle instead of being helpful. I end up looking like a crazy person because I start talking back to the calm robot lady sayng "but you JUST TOLD me to place the item IN the bagging area - make up your mind!"

The same goes with those automated calling robot people who want me to tell them outloud what I need on the phone. Today I call Sprint to make an account change and I get "please say outloud what you would like to do today. You can say something like 'make payment' or 'billing question.'" So I say "upgrade my plan." And the machine says "did you say 'billing question? please say YES or NO." I say "NO." Robot lady says "our billing options have changed, please hold while I transfer you." CLICK. I call back and finally get it to understand "upgrade my plan" and she says "ok, I will transfer you to a representative." I hold for fifteen minutes. I can't take it anymore. I go clean my bathtub.