It's a usual morning at queue central: three cashiers off sick, one till throwing a strop, six supervisors fighting over one set of keys and fifty customers all trying to queue for till eight as they're far too blind to notice that there are five others slightly to the left.

Sitting on till six, well aware that the boss is probably watching from the CCTV screens he had fitted into his office to keep an eye on us (although the official documentation stated it was to save money on a camera operative) so I make some random abortive gestures so it looks like I'm actually trying to attract people over. But why would I want to do that? I'm enjoying my quiet little sit-down.

Over at the helpdesk, one of the till supervisors finally manages to wrest a set of keys away from the throng and turns to notice the braying mobs. Some people are promoted to supervisor for their skills in organisation and democracy. Others because they have a big set of lungs.

'THERE ARE MORE TILLS OPEN TO YOUR LEFT!' she bellows, with a warning glare to us that we'd better get on with it. Switching into Pleasant Mode, that glazed smile one adopts to hide any inner thoughts one might have about a customer, I grudgingly begin scanning.

It's early so the shoppers are mainly the slightly vacant, elderly type. The sort who buy forty-seven tins of cat food every day of the week, and a packet of denture grips, then conduct a search through every pocket of every one of the twenty-seven assorted bags they are carrying for their purse, which invariably contains nothing but coppers. I don't mind - the longer they spend counting out four pounds and forty-eight pence in twopence pieces and pennies, the less I have to do. It also gives entertainment in watching the queue silently seethe at the hold-up, desperately wanting to berate the old biddy in question, but with the admirable British reserve keeping their upper lips stiff and their lower lips trembling with rage.

Despite the promising start, it gets to mid-morning and the Pram Posse begin arriving in quantities that would have the manager of Mothercare dribbling. The ritual of meeting up with long-lost friends they haven't seen since -ooh- yesterday, while simultaneously blocking whole aisles begins in earnest, and soon there is gridlock. And a rush on talc and baby lotion. The queues expand rapidly as each customer is accompanied by what can only be described as a pushable bus. I don't know if it's something to do with European NCAP safety crash tests, but the days of the simple fold-up pushchair seem to be over. These days it has to be at least the size of a Mini to have any status in the baby-carrying hierarchy.

I 'accidentally' nudge my basket trolley out into the checkout lane just enough to snag any pushchair sized for a baby over 'emaciated', and catch my first victim, who decides that instead of disentangling her wheels from mine, she'll just push as hard as she can and hope brute force solves it.

It doesn't. There is a crack, and a sliding noise as a pushchair wheel rolls under the nearest display. The pushchair makes an ungraceful drop to the floor and the baby's screams lead the mother to abandon her basket and leave in a hurry. What a pity - it just seems to have shortened my queue. One down...

Within a few minutes comes my first 'difficult' customer of the day. She's been raiding the clearance stand and comes through with half a dozen reduced items. With a threatening glance she makes it very clear that they are reduced and she doesn't want to be overcharged for them. This I do. What she doesn't notice is that I've surreptitiously added a few pounds to certain other items in the basket. She doesn't notice until I've finished the transaction, at which point I tell her that the till is faulty and she'll have to go to the helpdesk (queue size: astronomical) for a correction as my till doesn't do refunds. I'm semi-correct; it doesn't unless I use the keys in my pocket I pilfered from the supervisor on my tea break.

Next up is a gentleman who's popped in for a bar of chocolate. A thirty pence bar of chocolate, for which he proffers a twenty pound note. By this point I fancy a tea break so I deliberately give him nine pounds seventy, all mixed up so he can't immediately see. A minute later he's back.

'I gave you a twenty!'

'Did you? I'm sorry, I don't remember what it was, I'll have to call the supervisor.' A quick ring on the bell later and I'm off to the cash office for a sit-down while my till is counted up and found to be correct. Well, it would be, the extra tenner residing in my pocket. I don't make mistakes with change.

I go back downstairs via the staff room for some cake and biscuits. Well, I need to keep my strength up, and it was Janine from Stationery's birthday. And very nice was her cake too. I keep a large chunk for later in my locker. Funny how quickly those cakes go - the rest of the staff will have to make do with a millimetre-thick slice each. Ah well, it's for their own sake. Most of the women are on diets and it wouldn't be good for them to be tempted like that.

Back downstairs, I get a paranoid. One of the old biddies who are now absolutely convinced that everyone is stealing their shopping, picking their pockets and short-changing them. She nearly has a heart attack when I attempt to pack her bags, so I attach a random security tag to her handbag to see if I can push her all the way by setting off the door bleepers. From what I can make out from the gasping and large crowd by the exit doors, I may have succeeded. And they said I'd never make a doctor.

Lunchtime approaches, and my queue is still far too long to get off, so I take action by collaring one of the girls from the nearest section to stand in my queue and divert people elsewhere. It's always handy to have cohorts on the shop floor - I do her price checks for her and she blocks me off when I want to get off - a nice arrangement.

On finishing the last customer, I make the mad obstacle race for the back door, attempting to get stopped by as few customers as possible. All the other shop floor staff have vanished, so I direct everyone to the light bulb aisle, whether they were asking for tissues or compost. Hell, they'll find it all eventually. Well, some of them. I have more important things on my mind, like whether the bakers have any steak pasties and doughnuts left.

Signing back in from my trip for food, I alter the timestamp so I get an extra half-hour sit down, and flop down in the staff room, acting like I've been working hard all morning. The management like to think they're getting their money's worth.

Thanks to my retiming efforts, I'm left alone as the last person goes back to slave. I bring out the tippex and swap people's hours around in the rota book, so that they have twelve cashiers in at the same time as me, and none for store opening. I also expand my hours for the past few days to make it look like I worked some nightshifts too - time and a half, and nobody in the daytime will know otherwise anyway. Polishing off the rest of the cake from earlier, I make my way downstairs nicely full and slightly better off.

The afternoon passes rapidly, with just one seriously stroppy customer, a sad middle-aged man who is desperately trying to look twenty-six, but who really looks like a sad middle-aged man desperately trying to look twenty-six. He's buying some aerosol paints, so I make him produce I.D, then refuse his credit card signature until he's signed the back of the receipt five times in different pens and shown me all his other bank cards. Making a surreptitious note of the numbers and expiry dates, I spend the rest of the afternoon deciding what to splash out on that night. I could use a new laptop?