Smarter Barter

Reading the paper this lunchtime, I noticed a snippet in the money pages that the oldest form of currency is cattle, being a bartering currency from over 9,000 years ago.

Well, having need of a few bits 'n' bobs from the supermarket and having a stray cattle or two in the back garden, I lassoed one in and hopped aboard for a bit of a bumpy ride to Sainsbugs just to see what the bartering power of a cow was.

Tied the cow to the trolley, snuck it past the security guard who was too busy being on the look out for shirtless yobs to notice us anyway, and began my wander around the aisles. Supermarket woefully lacking on information via a vis the exchange rates for cattle, so I had to guess, and hope they'd provide change to the value of chickens if the rate was good value and a top up from the spare goat I'd brought along just in case the value was poor.

Trolley half filled with shopping, I approached the tills. I could have filled the trolley right up but the cattle had left an embarrassing present a la poop in the biscuit and cake aisle and I felt it was time to leave. The tills, as usual, were knee deep in queues, and as I am pretty good with the self-service tills I thought I might as well use one of those.

Put the shopping through, no probs. Total - one cattle exactly! Well, one hasn't been on shopping duties for the past 28 years without developing a sense of guesstimating the bill fairly accurately.

So, pressed the 'Finish and Pay' button and tried to pass the cattle across the scanner. Dear reader, the scanner wouldn't accept my cow payment! After several attempts, I called over an assistant.

'This machine won't accept my payment of cattle,' I said.

The assistant looked at me and then the cattle and then me again.

'Oh, it won't,' said she. 'This machine will only accept sheep.'

'Why, pray tell?' said I, stringing the joke out as long as possible.

'Because only sheep have baaaa codes!' said the assistant.

Boom, boom!