10 items or else

On one of my rare visits to the supermarket I put a bunch of BOGOF items into my basket. I bought ten distinct things so queued in the 10 items or less lane — trying hard not to gnash my teeth at their grammatical snafu of using less instead of fewer.

Unloading my 17 articles onto the conveyor met with the usual British passive-aggressive behaviour from surrounding patrons: a few stares, tuttings and general under-the-breath mutterings of ‘this checkout is only for 10 items’.

My argument is — and always will be — that because 7 of the products are designated as BOGOF by the supermarket, these over-quota 7 items technically don’t exist and I’m therefore justified in using the lane.

This argument of course fell on deaf ears; have you ever tried debating the finer points of quantum physics with a pensioner and a downtrodden single mum in Tescos? It’s no pic-a-nic, BooBoo.

In the end I gave up arguing, so you know what I did? Put a Next Customer Please divider about halfway through my shopping, and paid for both sets separately. The beautiful irony being it slowed down all the complainers behind me, too. Mwuahahahahaaaaaa.