I am regularly told I have a “calming presence”, but few things get me angry faster than:

“Unexpected item in bagging area, please remove all unbagged items”

“Please place scanned item in bagging area”

“Unexpected item in bagging area, please remove all unbagged items”

“Please wait, system processing.”

“Please wait, help is on the way.”

[Screen locked, not a soul in sight]

I force myself to be cordial with the attendant since it is not their fault, but I am fully ready to Office Space that goddamn checkout kiosk.

I'm in the same boat. I rarely lose my shit. I'm the person in others lives that they come to when they need a calm, collected perspective, I calm my children easily, I enjoy letting people talk to me about their problems and I don't profer up unsolicited advice, etc.

The exception to the rule is when technology goes fucking sideways on me. Of course, in our world that means that I'm losing my shit over some misbehaving piece of technology on an ever increasing basis.

The machines at CVS and Safeway have the most annoying tone. It snips at you so quickly and frequently during routine usage.

I’m with you on the office space response. I would take sweet pleasure in providing an “unexpected item” right through its guts.

"I force myself to be cordial with the attendant since it is not their fault"

Exactly, it isn't that the situation isn't irritating it's that an honest person will initially be cordial about it. The ones that are trying to pull something go straight to overt anger because they, mistakenly, think employees are trained to give an "angry" customer what they want.

Not in my experience. I pumped gas, worked at Dunkin Donuts, scooped ice cream, worked in a retail chain pharmacy, and managed a massive high performance computing facility. Sometimes the nicest people are the ones robbing you.

In the article they say "Mostly those who are trying to scam the registers are the ones who get upset the most.".

We would need some study to confirm it.

“The [shopper] doth protest too much, methinks"

> In my experience when a customer acts angrily they are often intentionally trying to do something wrong.

The article claims this too. I’ll be honest: it doesn’t match up with my experience. Self check kiosks are frustrating, even for people with the patience of a saint (which also should not be a requirement to buy things).