Let's talk about self-checkouts. Last night wifey told me she was using one at the local megamart, and it reminded me of an incident I endured a while back. I was in line behind this guy who frankly was absolutely dumbfounded by the machine. I believe he'd never seen a UPC symbol in his life. He was scanning the items without any regard to where the barcodes were, and due to the fact the scanner had two planes to pass through (one on the bottom and one on front) he was batting at about 62% in actually getting the stuff to scan. He was just blindly passing stuff by, and of course he'd run into items that didn't scan and the machine started bogging down, asking him to rescan his last item because it didn't sense the scan yet weight was applied to the bag. Eventually the little clerk watching over the self-checkout area came over, and started his "scanning 101" instructions. This guy (who seemed self-aware) simply did not have the synaptic capacity to be using this machine. Despite his best efforts to understand, it didn't dawn on him the machine was actually seeing the "little bar code thingy" and eventually the "helper" became a traditional cashier, running everything through for him. It's okay to be ignorant, that is if you have the CAPACITY to learn. Otherwise, stick to the slow wait in line, which is what my visit to the self-checkouts turned into. It was so frustrating it hurt, and I really wish I could have projected that pain forward to that guy in line as his brain cell #4 sprung into action. He truly didn't get any of it, and deserves a beatdown for not recognizing that and wasting my time and the time of the 3 people behind me.