I would like to speak to whoever decided I should be working at the grocery store.

I don’t mean shopping at the grocery store. I have been doing that for fifty years and I am very good at it. I have a list. I have a system. I go up and down the aisles in order, which is the only civilized way to do it, and if you are one of those people who zigzags, I want you to know that I have noticed and I have opinions.

No. I mean working. Scanning. Bagging. Operating a register. Because that is what self-checkout is. It is a job. I did not apply for this job. I was not interviewed. I was not trained. I am not being paid. And yet here I am, every Tuesday and Friday, standing in front of a machine that has more opinions about my groceries than I do.

The machine and I have a relationship now. It is not a good one. The machine speaks to me in a voice that is patient in the way that a person is patient when they have already decided you are the problem. “Please place the item in the bagging area,” it says. I have placed the item in the bagging area. I am looking at the item. It is in the bagging area. The machine disagrees.

“Unexpected item in the bagging area.”

There is nothing unexpected about a can of diced tomatoes. I put it there. On purpose. With my hands. The only unexpected thing in this bagging area is me, a seventy-three-year-old woman who spent twenty-two years running a high school and is now being corrected by a scale.

I have tried reasoning with the machine. It does not reason. I have tried moving faster. It does not like that either. Move too fast and it freezes. Move too slow and it starts the whole speech over, from the top, like a substitute teacher reading the attendance sheet for the third time.

And then there is the produce. I have been buying bananas for half a century. I know what a banana is. But the machine needs me to look up the code for a banana, which I do not know, because I am not a grocery store employee, because I do not work here. There is a screen with pictures of fruits. There are more fruits on this screen than I have seen in my entire life. I am scrolling through tropical options I cannot identify, looking for the most common fruit in America, and there is a line forming behind me.

Don says I should just use the regular checkout lane. Don has always been a man of simple solutions. But the regular checkout lane is a museum exhibit now. There are twelve self-checkout stations and one register with a human being, and that human being has a line that stretches to the dairy aisle. So my choices are: wait twenty minutes to have a person do this, or do it myself, badly, in about the same amount of time but with more public humiliation.

I chose the humiliation. I always choose the humiliation. I think we all do.

Here is what bothers me. I was a principal for twenty-two years. I oversaw a building. I managed a budget. I ran assemblies, settled disputes, called parents, supervised staff, and once talked a sixteen-year-old boy out of a tree, which is a long story and not the point. The point is that I am a competent person. I have demonstrated competence across a wide range of situations. And this machine has reduced me to someone who cannot buy a lemon without assistance.

A light flashes. Red, usually. The light means you need help. A very nice young person comes over and scans their badge and fixes whatever you did wrong, which was everything, and they do it without making eye contact because they have done this four hundred times today and they are tired of us. I don’t blame them. I am tired of us too.

My friend Marlene refuses to use self-checkout on principle. She says it eliminated jobs and she won’t participate. I respect this position. But Marlene also will not use the microwave, so her range of acceptable technology stops somewhere around 1975, and I am not sure she is the model for modern resistance.

I use the self-checkout. I use it because the alternative is worse. I use it because I don’t have twenty minutes. I use it because I have accepted, as we all have, that the grocery store has handed me a job I did not ask for, and I am going to do it, and I am going to do it badly, and nobody is going to say thank you.

Six years I’ve been doing this. Six years of scanning, bagging, looking up produce codes, and arguing with a machine about where I put the tomatoes. Six years of unpaid labor in a fluorescent-lit room where I am both the customer and the help.

I think I’ve earned a performance review. Or at least an employee discount.