Determined Old Lady Tale
Today at the till next to me an old (but by no means elderly) woman had, unusually, got round the shop, chosen the items she wished to purchase, placed these items in her basket, taken them to the checkout and they had all scanned, no trouble at all.

The problem occurred when it came to entering her PIN, the machine seemed to take it as being entered too soon, and she complained that the buttons weren't all working properly, highly doubtful thought I since it had functioned just fine for the last 4 hours I'd been working.

Anyway after a lot of people got held up the assistant assigned to help this poor woman endeavoured to ask whether or not she used glasses, a suggestion which was flatly rebuked. In fact she announced her PIN to the entire shop and invited the assistant to watch her put it in, when all of a sudden the problem became clear.

She hadn't noticed the top row of buttons (ie. 1 2 3) and instead had been pressing 4 instead of 1, 8 instead of 5 etc, hence why when she pressed 9 the machine took this to be her attempt at entering her PIN. When this was explained to her, she cried 'Oh, this is ridiculous, if I'd known how terrible your keypads are I'd have brought my glasses!' at which point the assistant walked off and I had to finish the transaction myself, trying desperately not to let loose a chuckle in her direction.
(sniffle is full of shit, Tue 9 Sep 2008, 23:50, Reply)