COLIN HOGG

COLIN CONSIDERS HIS OPTIONS FOR A FULL-TIME JOB

“Please don’t call me sir,” I felt like telling the supermarket checkout woman when she did just that the other day.

“Please call me Col,” I wanted to say. Being called the “s” word makes me feel ancient – and that’s the last thing I need at my age.

Really, it might be much better if we all wore name tags at the supermarket just like the workers have to, so we can all be on first-name terms.

Calling customers sir or madam just isn’t the casual Kiwi way. In fact, it might be better if we all wore name tags at all times, except maybe at home where, hopefully, we’re already on first-name terms.

While we’re on the topic, one of the other faintly annoying things about supermarkets – apart from all the plastic – is the fact that we spend so much of our lives in them.

I’ve thought deeply about this and I reckon, across several visits, I spend around three hours a week in total wandering the supermarket aisles.

Shockingly, this would mean that, across a shopping life of, say, 50 years, I’d spend a total of almost a year in supermarkets. Though perhaps all that’s being revealed here is that I spend an awful lot of time out shopping for groceries.

And it’s true. With more time on my hands than I used to have when I was flat out working all the time, I do pop out to the supermarket more often than I used to. It’s not really a chore. I quite like the supermarket.

There’s something soothing about pushing a trolley through familiar aisles – knowing where everything is, even the chicken stock (which everyone knows is a notoriously hard-to-locate item). But that’s what happens when you’re not fully employed. The brain softens a little.

There are other men in my position. Some of them are friends of mine. We used to gather for coffee once a week and shoot the breeze about shopping issues, the scandalous price of vegetables.

But then one of them got a full-time job, though he didn’t admit it at first. Instead, he kept saying he couldn’t make it because he had a meeting he couldn’t get out of. Now, I hardly ever see him at all and our little coffee circle has fallen apart for lack of numbers. It would all be a bit sad if it wasn’t so tragic.

I’m beginning to think that I need a full-time job too and I’m considering my options, though there’s hardly a big crowd of them and some are barely worth considering. For instance, my darling wife was terribly keen for a while that I become an Uber driver in my spare hours.

I’m not sure why she thought

I’d be good at driving strangers around when I’m not even particularly good at driving myself around. I don’t really do small talk. Also, my car has only two doors and isn’t a natural taxi.

The other option might be something in a supermarket, seeing I spend so much time in the places anyway. I’m not sure I can handle all the smiling required for a checkout position, but I could give it a go.

“How’s your day been so far?” I could ask the customers. “Call me Col.”