It is a few days before Christmas. I am out shopping at a well-known upscale department store in the Greater Boston area. I take nine items to the cash register. The cashier passes her magic wand over each package to read the bar code, and the impact printer rattles away as it prints a description and price for each item. I am getting ready to pull out my credit card when the woman turns to the cash register beside her and, horror of horrors, starts keying in the exact same information manually, reading the numbers off each package in turn.

She is on package number six when I clear my throat conspicuously and, with the indignation of a time-study specialist, ask her why in the world she is duplicating the work of the bar-code reader. She waves me to silence with the authority of one accustomed to doing so. "Please, I have to finish this," she says politely. I tell her to take her time, even though my muscles are tightening up and my brain is engaging in vivid daydreams of punitive acts.

She finishes the last package, ignores my pointed sigh, reaches for a pencil, and . . . starts all over again! This time she is writing in longhand on the store's copy of the receipt a string of numbers for every package. I am so shocked by this triple travesty that I forget my anger and ask her in true wonder what she is doing. Once more she waves me to silence so she can concentrate, but then obliges: "I have to enter every part number by hand," she says. "Why?" I ask, with a discernible trembling in my voice. "Because my manager told me to," she replies, barely suppressing the urge to finish her sentence with the universal suffix "stupid." I could not let this go. I called for the manager. He looked at me knowingly and said with a sigh, "Computers, you know."

I told him that this looked a bit more serious than that, and he proceeded to explain in slow, deliberate phrasing that the central machine didn't work, so a duplicate had to be entered by hand.