The self-service checkout. In a 2021 survey, almost 67 per cent of shoppers had failed during the checkout process at a self-checkout counter. And get this ... research done by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine discovered that self-checkout stations contained five types of disease-causing bacteria, withone of them commonly present in human waste (Enterococcus). Make sure to wash your hands properly after using one if you need to!
Bad fiction awards
The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest calls for entrants to “compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels”. This was a runner-up in the Children’s section: The Director of Child Protective Services was aghast, and needed clarification, “Let me get this straight - You were rocking your baby on the tree top, and when the wind blew, the cradle rocked and the bough broke, the cradle fell, and down came baby, cradle and all?” (John Tracy, Palm Desert, CA)
“I’m 2 years older than my sister. When she was 5, we walked up to the tree a couple of weeks before Christmas and found a huge box with her name on it. I was pissssed. I would cry and she would brag about it every night. Then Christmas came and she opened the huge box. It was a large reading lamp. She couldn’t stop crying, I couldn’t stop laughing.”
