Bar(code) Hopping

Despite what you might think, the most brutal social equalizer in America is the not the Department of Motor Vehicles. It's the neighborhood grocery.

Sure, you might argue that the more likely candidate is the DMV. That's a fair call, but there are three problems with that analysis:

1) Not everybody drives, so not everybody has to visit the DMV.

2) We all have to buy milk. I think there's a law.

3) The DMV is not, technically, staffed with earthlings.

Yes, the grocery. And I'm not talking about those clever, trendy Mom 'n' Pop boutiques that sell eleven things (three are actually in stock), at prices that require a co-signer, and that employ piped-in Enya albums to discourage browsers. Granted, these boutiques are the be-and-end-all when your sadistic recipe calls for a half-bottle's spritz of non-necrotic, fully-fleece-friendly, free-range Azerbaijanian goat appendix. But we're not likely to long for such culinary treats here in America, where the average grocery list revolves around various types of cheese spelled with a "Z."

No, I'm talking about those cavernous shopping-center anchor stores with consistently misspelled names, like Bi-Now and Banana Republix and Kroakers and Great Big Honkin' Food Planet.

Admittedly, we could chat and dicker for days about the various irritations that define the grocery shopping experience. There are no clocks. There are no windows. There are 38 dozen check-out lanes (three are actually open). There are more "breakfast power bar" options than there are humans who can actually afford to eat breakfast. They have a bizarre fascination for magazines about miracle diets, Oprah, alien babies and Brad Pitt. To get from hamburger meat to hamburger buns requires 3 bus transfers and an estimated 2 hours (estimated, for there are no clocks).

Not to mention the subway ride back over to the grocery's Cheez Aisle.

But today, I want to draw your attention to the "check your own self out" lanes: those 4-6 little automated kiosks, off to the side, that theoretically let you warp-speed your way through the check-out process by theoretically scanning your own grocery items, with absolutely no human intervention whatsoever. It was, as polite people might put it, a "nice idea."

You know 'em. You wanna like 'em. You wanna use 'em.

You can't.

First, your ears are sand-blasted by some quasi-robotic female voice, welcoming you to the "your own self" process, and thanking you in advance for using the "your own self" process. I call her Gladys, after the legendary Greek Harpy "Calaeno," because I can't spell "Calaeno," and because I seriously doubt any dedicated scholars of ancient Greece are studiously hunched over this article, fact-checking my facts about check-out lines at the grocery.

Gladys then proceeds to lure your shopping cart in-between a pair of monsters, Scylla and Charybdis.

Okay, not true. Gladys does no such thing. According to Greek legend, Scylla had six heads, twelve feet, and dog heads coming out of her torso, and as such, she's not likely to be working at a local grocery, unless she belongs to a union. But again, I'm gonna run with the imagery until an alert Greek scholar pops in to call me on it, which is not likely to happen anytime soon, given that Greece seems to be busy trying to invade itself.

(Historical footnote: Scylla's partner in crime, Charybdis, was allegedly just a great big mouth that belched whirlpools three times a day, and is currently polling several points ahead in the 2010 Senate race in Nevada.)

Next, Gladys' robo-programming requires her to ask if you have any coupons or a frequent shopper card. This heralds your first actual interaction with "The Scanner" (starring Keanu Reeves as "Neo-Politan" and Adam Sandler as "Glitch").

Assuming you successfully scan your cards and coupons, or manage to convince Gladys and Senator Charybdis that you don't have any, you're then prompted to begin scanning the now-rancid food that you hauled up to "your own self" earlier that day. Gladys instructs you to scan your items and to immediately place them in one of the conveniently-located plastic bags, which were conveniently injection-molded into some kind of formless synthetic blob with no visible top, bottom, sides or openings. Note that you will have approximately eleven seconds to get each item into a bag before Gladys robotically sighs, raises her voice, and testily repeats her demand.

And, to be fair, the process works. For a while. But there's always at least one rogue grocery item that refuses to be scanned. Always. What to do? Sure, there may be a Certified Your-Own-Self customer service attendant standing nearby, sporting back-of-the-crayon-box-painted fingernails and busily text-messaging. So help is on the way!

Don't hold your breath. If there is actually an attendant on duty at all, she'll be harboring deep career resentments, silently blaming you for many things, and she'll look like someone whose great-grandparents lost a cruel bet at Ellis Island.

But feat not, gentle reader. As always, I'm here for you. There are many alternative scanning techniques you can employ to tame that recalcitrant grocery item. Here are some of my favorites:

• The Dickens Slow Burn: inching your grocery item every-so-slowly past the scanner (think "glacier"), in case the scanner needs a few more hours to decode the barcode, or a little more time to complete its Bachelor of Scan Arts degree

• The Tolkien Dragon: raising and lowering the item while moving it slowly across the scanner window, like some undulating uber-mountain-worm, under the assumption that the Scanner Gods will ultimately discover its heritage

• The Escher Alter-Angle: making the assumption that the scanner window will ultimately find a favorable point-of-view, if you'll just dimensionally twist and contort the grocery item enough times

• The Einstein Time Warp: rapidly shoving your item back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until the laws of "this week's special" relativity kick in, at which point the scanner complies and subtracts the cost of gravity from your bean dip

• The Lovecroft Retina Burn: determinedly holding the grocery item in front of the cursed scanner until the food has passed its expiration date, at which point the on-duty attendant becomes wracked with guilt and goes on break.

One of these techniques is guaranteed to work. Soon, you'll be happily dripping ice cream across the parking lot and, on your way home, frantically trying to think up ways to finish your carton of milk before "The Date."

And then you get home and realize you forgot to buy cereal.