Noon of the Dead

Well, had other stuff to do today –such as the copy for the latest column bearing this name (yes, I still rant in print as well as cyberspace. I know, how quaint, how retro…). But I just have to pass on today’s encounter with the living dead in a supermarket.
There we were, one happy family, having successfully parked the jalopy in what’s left of the supermarket car park now that the powers that be have finally decided to fill the stonking great hole that appeared in the middle of it two years ago. In the process they’ve created a rubble pile three times the size of the hole, parked a digger which is fast disappearing into the ever-subsiding perimeter of the hole and managed to block off the recycling bins, but ho hum….whatever!
Next we successfully steered a trolley with duff wheels round shelves remarkable for the absence of anything vaguely fresh or edible, and even found a till with no queue staffed by a kid who actually seemed keen to serve us. As Her Indoors and Junior Management took up position ready to pack stuff as it was scanned, I placed the first item on the conveyor belt…..and then the nonsense started.
Some three-nippled, mouth-breathing old throwback in an IOM Steam Packet jumper (which is tantamount to an admission you only procreate with siblings and cousins) put one of those ‘next customer’ plastic things just behind my first item and then dumped a 24 pack of industrial effluent-based lager on the conveyor belt just behind that.
He seemed intellectually incapable of understanding that this, once placed on the conveyor belt, would not stand still and that the six free inches between my first item and it would not magically expand as I tried to unpack the rest of the contents of a large trolley into it.
Believe me, I tried to educate him. Politely, in words (short ones), and by pointing to my full trolley and indicating the vast difference in height, width and depth between the two spaces.
I even pointed out that there was a space at the end of the till which wasn’t part of the conveyor belt, where he could place his economy priced mouthwash without it moving. His answer was “Well, you could pack faster than that”, which suggested a worrying unfamiliarity with basic concepts of time and space…or anything else really.
Eventually I was reduced to moving his 24 pack back to the end of the conveyor after unloading every second or third item from our trolley, while he grumbled to a (presumably female) co-idiot with slightly less facial hair about the time it was taking me to empty my trolley so he could get served. The kid on the till was almost blue in the face in an effort not to laugh in case Barnacle Bill noticed and he got drawn into the action , while somehow I managed not to explode.
What more can I say? I bend over backwards to defend quaint Manx eccentrics against a harsh, unforgiving world, but there’s a limit.
Hopefully this Neanderthal was too old to catch any female relative over the age of, say, 12. He was also ugly as sin and unlikely to be economically active enough to pay for sex, so at least he can’t add to the sum of local stupidity.
However, simpletons like this are still a major factor in disasters like the election of Leonard Singer, the current Ramsey MHK who isn’t Allan Bell, and that has to be a cause for concern.