It's rather quiet this afternoon - the morning was unremarkable - there's only so many times you can go through the palaver of an old lady trying to pay for her shopping without her hearing aid before you switch off.

"That's four pounds twenty-eight please."

"Fourteen what, love?"

"FOUR pounds, twenty eight pence."

"Forty pounds? But I only bought a pack of denture cleaners, some cheap toilet roll and some budgie seed!"

"No, FOUR pounds. One, two, three, FOUR"

"Oh! Why didn't you say?", she remarks indignantly before handing me two pounds and a two Euro coin.

"This is a Euro - I can't accept it."

"No it isn't, it's one of those two pound coins." One of us handles cash all day long, the other wears glasses thick enough to fry ants if the sun shines at the right angle and is of course infallible. Hmm.

In despair, she thrusts her purse at me and tells me to take the right amount. I wouldn't dream of stealing from a little old lady, even a deaf, blind, patronising old windbag like her, so I take out the right coins and instruct her as to what a two pound coin actually looks like. (Hint: It says "Two Pounds" on it.)

My brain is resting nicely when the supervisor of the minute appears and tells me that while it's quiet, they want me to go and help tidy up the towels. There's some sort of end-of-range sale on, so they've been piled on a table at the front. What started off as a neatly organised display has disintegrated within minutes to something resembling a jumble sale. We even had people walk out, convinced they'd wandered into H&M by accident.

As I stand there folding, a middle-aged battleaxe wanders up vaguely, her hands itching to do something pointless. She takes a liking to a certain design of red towel. Despite there being four of them already unfolded directly in front of her, she digs down into the pile to find a freshly folded one and waves it around for a bit, perhaps to flag down a passing plane or antagonise any local bulls. I give her the official "I hope you're going to put that back as you found it" look, but she doesn't take the hint, dumping it down the side of the display like a used nappy. To add insult to injury, she then reaches back to the pile and chooses a brand new identical but neat one to buy. Someone's in for it now...

Just in time to stop me rebuking her, it gets busy at the tills and I'm called back. Surprise surprise, guess who's in my queue with her lovely folded towel? She places it daintily on the counter, so I make a great show of unfolding it, allegedly searching for alarm tags (adding one just for comedy value) then stuff it in a carrier bag all crumpled up. She doesn't dare say a word, but I can tell what she's thinking and I'm not going to be thought at in that tone of voice. As luck would have it, she's also buying some washing powder. Boxes of washing powder are notorious for leaking white powder all over everything in the bag, or at least, they are after I poke a hole in them with my biro. That red towel doesn't look quite so neat now, does it?

On my way out to the back for my break, I'm following that great bugbear of all shop workers - the child having a tantrum loud enough for the entire county to hear them. It's bearable in small doses, but hearing it repeatedly for all of a seven hour day does tend to grate. However, we're passing a nice display of expensive ornaments, and the child is lagging behind. Mum's not looking, so...

* CRASH *

"Oh dear, you really shouldn't touch the ornaments!" I tell the slightly puzzled-looking child, as he stands in the middle of a minefield of broken ceramics. "Look with your eyes, not your hands!"

The little brat's mother, of course, only sees the aftermath of this. Naturally, she assumes it was the child who broke the thirty-nine ninety-nine china horse ornament. Someone's going to get it.

"LOOK WHAT YOU'VE DONE! DIDN'T I TELL YOU NOT TO TOUCH! YOU NEVER LISTEN TO ME! RIGHT! WE'RE GOING STRAIGHT HOME, YOU'RE NOT GETTING ANY TOYS!" She turns to me. "I'm terribly sorry about this - do you want me to pay for it?"

I contemplate getting her to write a cheque for the Correction of Amalgamated Smashed Housewares (or its abbreviation), but it's getting late and I could really do with some lunch, so I decline and nip out the back, hijacking a passing supervisor to tell them about the terrible smashing noise I heard, and how I'd love to investigate but I only have a short lunchbreak... What a pity. I hand her a dustpan and brush and tell her to make sure she's not missed a bit - it could be very unfortunate for the company if anyone slipped and sued.

Hiding the shard I'd picked up from the scene of the incident, I set off whistling. Wouldn't it be a tragedy to have a week off work with a twisted ankle after slipping after such a shoddy bit of cleaning? And the ensuing lawsuit would at least buy me an iPod...