Are there things you just 'don't get' in life? (as in understand the rules of)

I seldom buy alcohol, but I do tend to purchase the likes of paracetamol. Also, if it wasn't for the fact that a brief glance from the assistant is sufficient to verify that I'm old enough to buy such items, I probably wouldn't hesitate to accept the flattery. 

Also, I am sure you are your harshest critic and consider yourself to look older than other people think you look. 

I actually do prefer self checkout too! Especially in the UK. 

Homebird said:

talking to the machine

I do 'telling off inanimated objects for being in a way while they shouldn't'

I never run into the age verification thing, maybe cos I’m teetotal. Or maybe the machine looks at me and goes ‘Damn, you old!’ Be flattered, Sparkly! 

I actually prefer the self-service checkouts to the manned tills, just that I can find the 'Russian Roulette' somewhat irritating. If I'm not having to wait for assistance due to a non-existent unexpected item in the bagging area, then I can usually guarantee that I'll need an assistant to verify my age, or else remove security tags. A nightmare when it seems like the rest of the customers at the self-service checkouts are also waiting for assistance.

I’m in the minority it seems in preferring the automated checkouts precisely because it avoids awkward interaction and the weirdness of one’s personal selection being examined item by item by an (admittedly indifferent) stranger. But the iron price is the Russian Roulette of ‘will I have to ask for help anyway?’ When something goes wrong - about one in four times I’d say. The worst is when something is too light to register. A toothbrush or birthday card or something. Then you start uselessly trying it vertically etc. before succumbing to the inevitable choice between looking helpless in the hope that you are noticed or going ‘excuse me, sorry to be a pain but…’ 

Many moons ago I worked in Castle Court, in a shop that’s no longer there. one year, the actual grotto Santa was got rid of (or so I was told) on account of a … questionable  history with children coming to light. It was put a little more bluntly I’m sure you can guess. 

Aw that’s awful. Though at that age most kids find secret keeping a huge challenge. Still, not nice to go through. 

that’s a good point about the school knowing.  Presumably I was also to tell the form teacher? We had various teachers. Or maybe the firm teacher knew but considered it a private matter so it really was up to me to fill in the information vacuum. I’ve always been, and remain, bad at the finer points of social etiquette. I put ten times more worry and thought into getting them wrong than others do into getting them instinctively right. 

Sparkly,

That must have been hard for you realising afterwards.  I hope it was all okay after talking it through.....

I agree that I don't think you did anything wrong. I would have reacted in exactly the same way as you did. It would not have occurred to me to let anyone at school know, unless I had been given explicit instructions to do so.

Presumably the teacher at school would have been made aware of why the girl was absent. I would have thought it would have been up to the teacher to announce to the class, with permission from her parents.

The information might have been given to you in confidence and not everyone wants people to know details about their illnesses.

It reminds me of when I was at primary school (aged around 8 or 9) I was off sick a lot. One girl kept asking me why but I did not want to share, as we were not friends and it was private information. She would not give up asking and swore to keep it a secret. In the end I told her just to get her to leave me alone. Of course she did not keep it a secret and by the next day the whole school knew and were making fun of me. It was a hard lesson for me to learn that people did not always do what they promised.

That's precisely why I refuse to use self-service checkouts ---totally ambiguous.

I try to be the strong, silent type; myself. 

With the benefit of hindsight, I do actually think my mother was right Former Member. It is one of the few occasions when I think she can be forgiven for verbally lashing out at me.

My dad wasn't one to wear his heart on his sleeve and was from a generation where men in particular were expected to keep a stiff upper lip. When he phoned me, I don't think he had fully processed just how bad the accident had been. I now believe that the reason why he had phoned me was that he DID want me to pop around, just that he was too proud and stubborn to say.

I also don’t think I would have shared the information. It was private information and  I would not have felt that it was appropriate to share.

Radical acceptance - the only sane path and yet frustratingly difficult most of the time. 

Thanks for your kind words. You seem a lovely person too 

Or like a flying island 

People saying yes but meaning no... Also passive aggressive is something I really don’t get. All of this indirect communication under the pretence of politeness to me just seems to create so many more issues and it is so confusing. Why not just say what you mean? ...

You would be even more appalled at the self checkouts in Luxembourg- they are so so much worse than the ones in the UK- I think they have improved a bit recently but when I grew up you could barely ever get through self checkout without it erroring ... and then you had to wait for someone to fix it. 

Shardovan,

I think that everything happens to teach us something. I have no regrets about anything because I know that I have most definitely learned from all my expereinces, good and traumatic.  I still try to trust before I judge and try not to mask as much as is possible.

I think you and many others on here are really sweet, loving and intelligent people.

Actually, I retract that time travel thing. It’s stupid and I wouldn’t and actually belongs to this topic. ‘I’d go back and change x if I could’ is said so often but it presumes that we’d arrive back to the present with everything else we treasure (experiences had, people met -or created!- in the years since) still there . Which they wouldn’t be. It’s the same thing with carping about history. All the ‘what those bastards did’ stuff that gets hashed through here (Northern Ireland) time and time again. Very understandably. And yet, go back far enough and change one thing to be kinder to your ‘side’ (hateful shorthand to have to use bit I don’t know how else to put it concisely) of the community and one wouldn’t even personally exist any longer to be sitting with a formed opinion on it one way or the other. If it came down to it, and change to the relative niceness of the present and recent past through time travel was truly possible, how many would really sacrifice their existence for the subjectively greater good (created in that scenario  too early for evolutions intended controlled pacing  anyway - another problem would just take its place )? Not many I think. Good job it’s hypothetical so we can all nonsensically and reflexively say we’d change something in a heartbeat, from a position of safely knowing they’ll never have to prove it. I’m guilty of it as recently as today. Masking even on here with a silly social conversational convention that carries no true conviction whatsoever.