“WE are being conned!” said Althea, the normally mild-mannered Canberra teacher as she slapped her champagne glass down on the table. “The big supermarkets are conning us.”

Jeremy nearly choked on his prawn cocktail. “Oh dear,” he said. “Not them, too.”

Jeremy is a lawyer and he thinks half the world is conning the other half and he may well be right. But it did make for a somewhat disjointed discussion as we sat around the deck enjoying the sunshine at our Tuross hideaway.

“You bet,” said Althea. “Haven’t you noticed? Now they’ve got us doing our own checkouts for free. We’re putting people out of a job – the students, the single mums who really need it – but we’re getting nothing for it. We’re being conned.”

“By heavens, you’re right,” said Jeremy. “You shoppers may have grounds for a class action.”

Frankly, I thought he was drawing a long bow, but nothing puts a rosy glow in Jeremy’s cheeks like the prospect of hitting a rort with a tort.

“They aren’t forcing us to use the self-serve checkout,” said Jeremy’s wife Clare, herself a former lawyer who saw the light and retrained as an astronomer.

“Just a matter of time,” said Althea. “They’ll gradually reduce the numbers of checkout people till we either wait for an hour in a queue or surrender to the inevitable. And do you know what? They’ll tell us they’re doing us a favour: that they’re keeping costs down so they can pass the savings on to the shoppers!”

“By heavens, you’re right!” cried Jeremy dashing a refill into the Czech crystal. “It’s the same with the airlines. We’re doing all the work checking ourselves in online… and we’re getting nothing for it, not even a nominal discount, nothing!”

Even Clare thought that was a bit rough and for the next 10 minutes we had a wonderful time rubbishing the airlines.

“And what about Dick Smith?” said Althea.

“Oh, no,” said Jeremy. “What’s he up to now?”

“No, I mean the Dick Smith shops. Woolworths have closed them down and put all those boys out of work and next thing they’ll be selling all that stuff in aisle 13 or whatever.”

“By God, you’re right. They’ve done Dick. Soon they’ll do to the rest of us what they did to Dick.”

“We’ll all be dicked,” chortled Clare and some of us choked on our Bollinger.

When the laughter finally died, Althea was back at it, but this time with an air of dark mystery. “Hey,” she said. “Whatever happened to Tim Mathieson?”

We looked at each other. Tim used to be up there on our TV screens every other night accompanying Julia to one thing or another. But now he’s disappeared.

“Stone the crows, you’re right,” said Jeremy.

Clare nodded. “They must have thought he wasn’t helpful to the PM’s image,” she said. “Tim’s been dic…” but the crashing waves just down from the deck muffled the end of the sentence.

However, it must have been vaguely amusing because Jeremy nearly fell off his chair.

robert@robertmacklin.com