Online shopping is a piece of cake, and garlic salt and . . .

By Roddy Phillips

Published:

POSSIBLY because her nose was about three inches from the computer screen and she was shaking her head constantly, my wife decided there was no future in doing our supermarket shopping online.

“I’m sorry, I can’t do this,” she shouted. “I thought I could, but I can’t; please take it away; I can’t see straight.”

She had broken out in a sweat, her neck had turned red and she was biting her nails; she was a woman on the edge. You would have thought I had asked her to determine the thermal-meltdown ratio of the sunshields on the space shuttle during re-entry. All I wanted her to do was choose a different type of garlic salt granules because we couldn’t find the kind we normally buy.

It was a tough decision, but someone had to make it and it certainly wasn’t going to be me. But then suddenly we were back on.

“That’s them,” screamed my wife, gripping me by the arm, “that’s them there, no there, back there, up a bit, no down, down . . . now they’ve gone; where have they gone, what have you done with them, they were right there a second ago, I saw them, what’s happened to them?”

“Maybe someone bought them,” I joked, which was a big mistake.

I peered slowly up at my wife and saw this deranged madwoman I had created inadvertently, snarling threateningly at me. When she gave me the slow, horrible, hollow laugh, I moved my chair a few inches farther away.

“OK, computer boy, make everything bigger again and we’ll put this sucker to bed,” she snapped.

Everything was bigger already and we have a big computer screen. In fact, everything was now so big we could see only three items at a time on the screen and they were the three items we had in our basket after almost half an hour of online food shopping.

“You see, this is the whole problem,” began my wife, scrutinising the screen in close-up again.

“It’s really tricky shopping when everything is flat, really flat, and so small. The items should be life-size and in 3D.”

“Like in a supermarket,” I said.

“Now you’re talking, professor,” replied my wife, removing her specs and nodding sagely as if she had just given me the answer to that old thermal-meltdown question.

“Can you do that?”

“I can, but it would involve getting into the car and driving there,” I replied helpfully.

“Although I have no doubt that one day the items probably will be life-size and in 3D,” I continued, my wife listening intently, “in fact, they’ll probably pop out of the screen and straight into the kitchen; we won’t even have to wait for them to be delivered.

“But until they come up with a completely virtual supermarket, this old flat-Earth one will have to do, I’m afraid, so what’s it going to be?”

My wife scratched her head for a moment and thought it over. “How many people do this?” she asked.

I admitted I didn’t have accurate statistics on the popularity of online supermarket shopping and this proved an unforeseen setback.

“But remember, you do see the van driving around here quite a lot,” I said.

“What if everything arrives and it’s all wrong or it’s all squashed because it has been rattled around in a van for hours?” asked my wife, looking now as if she had found a vital flaw in that thermal-meltdown equation.

“We’ll sue them,” I shouted.

“Good plan; go for it,” she said. “Anyway, you’ve got the message list, so you can’t go wrong, but I want to check it over before you post it to them.”

“E-mail it to them,” I corrected.

“That’s what I said,” replied my wife as she disappeared.

All of this came about after my wife sent me to the supermarket with a huge cardboard shopping list very similar to the one used in the Big Brother house. I vowed I would never go shopping again with a message list that size, even if it was big enough to hide behind.

I now had that cardboard message list propped up on my desk next to my computer screen and suddenly taking it to a real supermarket seemed a very appealing idea.

“That’s decaffeinated coffee, remember,” said my wife, sticking her head round the door, “and unwaxed lemons.”

I nodded and waited.

“Unwaxed,” she repeated.

I nodded away, bent double over the computer keyboard. It was like being some poor slave of a clerk in 19th-century Tsarist Russia.

“Have you got the store card?” shouted my wife from the kitchen.

I did have the store card, I also now had a fair idea where to put it.

Our first delivery was booked in for the following evening, by which time both of us had forgotten about it, although personally speaking I may have subconsciously deleted the experience from my memory.

Consequently, when the delivery man called to ask our exact whereabouts after driving past the house three times, we were pitched into a state of alarm and I was sent to the bottom of the drive to guide him in.

He seemed to arrive with half the contents of the supermarket, which was slightly concerning, considering I couldn’t remember ordering three-quarters of a van full of stuff.

He was a very nice chap, though, and as we unpacked he entertained me with hair-raising stories about his day job as a ratcatcher.

“Whoops,” he shouted at one point, grabbing me by the arm, “what was that running around over there?”

Luckily, there was nothing breakable in any of the three bags I dropped and we did laugh. Although, after the third time, the surprise element started to wear off.

Just as he was leaving, my wife appeared and stood her ground over our collection of trove like a pirate queen.

“Not bad, considering it was delivered by a ratcatcher,” I said.

“Typical,” said my wife. “They have to be different, don’t they. Why can’t they just have an ordinary delivery man? It’s a good job everything’s in bags.”