The words are coming out all weird

Last week I worked 64 hours. No words can adequately describe the vacuous stupor I had regressed to by the time Saturday - my only day off - rolled around. As a Sales Assistant, you basically act as an automaton, spewing out a few set phrases while handling the cash and dying inside. It's not challenging work, to say the least, but, as I discovered, once you do it for ten hours a day, things quickly start to go wrong.

What happens is that those mechanical sentences that you blurt out to customer after customer, day after day, start to become interchangeable. Already devoid of meaning due to endless repetition, they begin to arbitrarily swap places. So instead of saying "Do you want a bag?" to the woman who has loaded herself up with trash mags and paid, you shriek out, "No problem". Then, disturbed by her confused gaze, numbly aware that you have done something wrong but unsure what, you yelp, "Good morning!". Which you've already said. Twice. And it's the afternoon. The woman scuttles off, befuddled and bagless. Meanwhile, you're barking "Bye! Take it easy!" to the businessman who's just sidled up to the counter to buy cigarettes.

Semantics no longer apply to the overworked retail pleb.

It has thus been a very easy ride this week, with a much more piddly and sensible 25 hours spent acting as conduit between consumer and hate-rag. What's more, refreshed after last week's brain burnout, I have been able to finalise my anthropological study of the shopping human.

Observation the third: The Human Creature Is Fervently, Relentlessly, Unwaveringly Solipsistic

The thing about humans is they assume that you care. They really do. They assume you care, they assume you remember them, and they assume you want to engage them in a discussion. What they do not understand is that, to you, the zombified lackey, they are just a stack of dull colours conveyor-belting past the desk, droning and cluttering coins and cards. There are no individuals from the perspective of the Sales Assistant; and the human desperately needs to learn this before, driven over the edge by some jovial Telegraph reader's account of his scout days, a pleb attacks their own face with a stapler while screaming about the lack of a Darwinian imperative to empathise with humans not in one's social circle. I reckon I could last about two more weeks before I'd do it.

Observation the fourth: The Human Creature Is Afflicted With Bizarre Paranoia

This one actually does strike me as quite revealing. About one in every seven or eight customers will demand their receipt, justifying the need specifically as "just in case I get stopped and I've got no proof that I've bought it". For funsies, I like to pretend sometimes that I've thrown the receipt away by accident, just to witness the look of sheer horror that sweeps through the faces of those - young and old, male and female - who presumably envisage a burly policeman tapping on their shoulder and growling, "Have you got a receipt for that chocolate bar? NO? You're fucking nicked then, my beauty!"

When has this ever, ever, ever happened? What empirical evidence are this huge demographic working from that they feel there is a genuine risk of being collared for the lack of a receipt? Humans. There's CCTV cameras in the store; there's CCTV cameras on the high-street outside; there's probably CCTV cameras on almost every road you walked through to get here. If needs be, they can trace your properly purchased, receiptless 68p magazine through the whole town. You're not going to go to jail, but your every movement has been tracked. Your worrying, I feel, would be vastly better spent on this fact.

Observation the fifth: The Human Creature Is A Slave To The Gift Card

I have never understood why humans buy gift cards. Never have, never will. For what other almost instantly discarded product are sensible people prepared to stump up £5? Five pounds! For a piece of paper which is looked at for a few seconds, and then placed away and forgotten forever. In the run up to Valentine's day, it got worse: eight, nine, ten quid spent on cards with terrible, saccharine poems and big shiny red hearts. I'm sorry. But I really feel this is worthy of an italicised rant. This is what I have wanted to say to around 500 people over the last couple of weeks:

Hello fool. Do you realise you could buy three second-hand books for that price at the Oxfam shop down the road? You could also write your partner a letter expressing how YOU feel, goddammit, instead of conveying your affections through this fiscally hideous, prosodically toxic, folding bit of tree. Where's your god damn originality? You're supposed to be in love, for christ's sake. Buy a god damn book - at a third of the price - and write a message on the title page. Stop being such a passive, ovine lummox. Just think, your spouse'll flick through the book in twenty years, long after they've left you, and might get a rueful smile out of it. "How things change," they might reflect. "Isn't it interesting how ephemeral amorousness can be?" they might ask their younger, newer, betterer-than-you partner.

My final - and only 100% serious - observation on the human creature, gleaned from my time in the retail sector, I shall write a couple of days before I fly to Ecuador on the 22nd.

This time next week I'll be 30,000 feet above the Atlantic.