A bit of a change today - they've got a few people off sick on the shopfloor, so I've been sent to help out there instead of sitting on the till. Apparently it breaks the keypad, having my weight on it...

First up, I'm helping set up a new layout in the toy department. A large pyramid-shaped stand, not unlike those seen against a video screen in a chain of movie-company owned gift stores is being lifted into place to be filled with soft toys of all shapes, sizes and degrees of fire-retardingness. It looks heavy though...

"Ow! My back!" I exclaim loudly, having barely touched the monolith. "That's such a breach of health and safety laws, making us lift something so heavy! And with only eight people! How irresponsible!"

Having struck the fear of litigation into them, I make a show of limping from the scene; once around the corner I head for the staffroom for a cuppa. Us injured need their recovery time.

On returning downstairs, I find they've managed to do the dirty, heavy job of shifting the stand to its correct position and are about to embark on the much more fun job of filling it with enticing pieces of "Made In Somewhere Cheap" crap. I make a miraculous recovery and head for the most interesting-looking boxes.

Finding a box of what is supposedly this year's must-have toy, I deliberately place them at the top of the pyramid, far out of reach of the average five year-old. The crappy little 50p stocking-fillers go around the base, as do a selection of cheesegraters, wire brushes, sandpaper, drawing pins and brushwood hanging baskets that just happened to have been mixed up with the toy boxes. Whoops.

Of course, it's not long before some enterprising brats decide to take shopping for toys into their own hands, and to climb the tower. The first, a six year-old boy, over whom his parents evidently have no authority, makes it to the second tier before plunging his hand down onto a cheesegrater and handily shredding half his skin, before falling face-first onto a sheet of extra coarse sandpaper.

His screams rouse the shop, but curiously not his parents, who have to be called over the tannoy to fetch the malodorous brat; they were too busy looking at teapots to care.

"I can't think how it happened!" I tell them in my voice of fake concern. "Some lazy customer must have just left their shopping hidden there under the five layers of teddy bears! How unfortunate! Mind, if your son had taken any notice of the many signs around the area forbidding climbing of the display..."

The note of menace in my voice detected, the family leave without a fuss to enquire after skin grafts at the local clinic. I return to find a spoilt seven year-old girl arguing with her parents.

"BUT I WANT IT NOW!" she bawls. "ELLIE'S GOT ONE, WHY CAN'T I?"

"It's not YOUR birthday!" the poor parent snaps. "You'll have to wait for Christmas." He wanders around the corner, supposedly with the little brat in tow. She, however, is having none of it and makes a bee-line for the stack; more accurately, the prize teddy on the top. Just as she gets there, I wander over and remove it right in front of her eyes.

"I want that!" she yells.

"This?" I simper in my most patronising voice. "Oh I'm so sorry my darling, but I've just sold the last one to someone else." Her shouting is unabated, so I turn, and in a more threatening tone, point out that she's now sitting on top of the stack, and her father is just about to walk around the corner and find her disobeying him. The rapidity of her descent is matched only by the intensity of her shouts as her knees meet the tips of the wire brush and she lands bum-first onto a pile of very prickly brushwood hanging baskets. Well, if they will climb on the displays...

Mindless violence aimed at annoying kids: I think I'd enjoy myself on the shop floor more often if it's always like this.