Sunday, March 6, 2011

Express Counter: What's not to understand?

Our hero leaps from his car and dashes past the metal grills of the entrance into the supermarket, quickly removing his ultra-cool sunglasses and making a beeline for the diapers and baby-stuff section. Acknowledging cheers from his (invisible and imaginary) audience, he snags a shopping basket and walks triumphantly to the targeted treasure. In a couple of seconds he snatches a pack of diapers and some body lotion for his partner and races back to the Stargate. It is unmissable. Bright red signpost with white letters: "Express Counter: Not more than 5 items."

"Jackson, start dialing...!" He yells in his mind.

Jackson begins to dial the checkout counter. Chevron one encoded, two... three... four... Suddenly, the gate controls flash the message: "inbound travelers". This is caused by two shoppers with an extremely overloaded shopping trolley lumbering across the front of the ring and rumble to a stop in front of the express counter! Our hero pauses in mid-flight, stupefied and expecting the cashier to override the command and point the offending shoppers to the regular Stargate.

Shock! The cashier begins processing the shopping items through the Stargate before our hero, and positions her face in such a way as not to catch the angry stares being directed at her. Stargate heroes are not usually the patient kind... Our hero wishes that he had brought along his Jaffar staff weapon just as a show of might. To add insult to injury, most of the counter cloggers wait until the items have been checked out to start looking for the appropriate currency from within their complex baggage devices. Oh well, this is P3X-Uchumi and signposts dont mean that much unless its Christmas shopping season. But surely, what's not to understand?

3 comments:

eddwak said...

Another Stargate Fan!

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

This happens in the great US of A, too. Bleh.