OK, I'm doing it!

How long have we had Chip and Pin in this country now? Well I'll tell you, it started around 2004, but the key day when cardholders had to be ready to use their PIN was 14th February 2006. So we have been using it regularly for a good four years now.

So why are we still being treated like PIN novices? Go to a supermarket till, and the cashier will scan all your items, then cheerfully announce the (usually frighteningly large) amount that you owe. You put your card in the PIN pad, and stand there with fingers poised. Then, when the machine tells you to "Enter PIN" you start to do just that.

It is usually around the time you press the second digit that the cashier chirps up "Can you pop your PIN in for me please?" Which makes me want to scream maniacally "I'm doing it!"

Even worse is those badly rehabilitated speak your weight machines - the self-service till. The carefully chosen anodyne voice of these tills will tell you to put your PIN in, sometime around the time you are re-sheathing your precious card, and tell you to remove your card sometime around the exit door.

Surely after 4 years of familiarity it would be reasonable for these machines, both mechanical and human, to only gently remind you about your PIN if you are manifestly not supplying it.

As a sideline, Mr Grumpy's recent experience at a car hire shed in Spain was a bit different. Some of my older readers will remember when credit cards used to be imprinted on hard toilet paper in a finger crushing machine. Well, in Spain I handed over my credit card and the man behind the desk solemnly got out his bit of toilet paper, laid it over my card and rubbed all over it with the end of a retracted ballpoint, like a brass-rubbing.

I called it Chap and Pen