It was that most Britpopular of bands Blur who argued in 1993, via their album Modern Life is Rubbish, that modern life is rubbish. Not all of modern life is rubbish of course: the Sky+ box is quite good, I like my iPhone, Twitter is amusing and I’ve even looked at the internet once or twice and liked it, but foolishly I read the last web page without reading the others first, so I know how it ends.

Oh, and this new-fangled food that you can get nowadays that is actually nutritious and tasty compared with the stuff I used to eat in Blur’s day, that’s quite good too. The only problem with this food, though, is that for modern convenience’s sake you have to buy it from supermarkets, and sadly this is exactly where you’ll find one of the most irritating aspects of modern life bar none.

That’s right, I’m talking about the self-service automated checkout machine that has crept into supermarkets over the past few years with the specific intention of driving shoppers into a rage.

There are six of these things in my local supermarket and they lurk in a bulky group between the normal tills and the aloof assistant with the nose piercing, like a nest of bad ideas.

There are quite a few things about these barcode-hungry Terminators that make me want to go postal in the crisps-and-nuts aisle: the not-in-any-way-easy-to-use touchscreen, the scales that can’t tell the difference between the weight of a melon and the weight of a packet of Quavers; the pierced-nose girl who glares suspiciously at everything you’re trying to scan in case you’re shoplifting your purchases or, worse still, taking more than one plastic bag.

That said, by quite some measure, the single most irksome thing about self-service checkout machines is the sonorous voice that, when you place something completely expected in the bagging area, loudly informs you that there is now “an unexpected item in the bagging area”.

The main reason this is so annoying is that, by definition, anything that one places in the bagging area has more than likely come from the shelves of the very supermarket you are in: a tin of dog food, say, or a box of cornflakes or a radish. Thus, anything you have placed in the bagging area could not in any way be described as “unexpected”.

Granted, if one were to place in the bagging area, say, an owl or a tractor or a gas-operated parsnip polisher, then, yes, the machine might have a point. That would be truly unexpected.

However, if, as happened to me last week, I place an ordinary jar of coffee in the bagging area, this should not come as a surprise to you. So just shut up with your stupid electronic announcements, repeated over and over, telling me that a jar of own-brand ordinary coffee granules is somehow unexpected, and do your job. I only wish I could surprise you with an item you certainly aren’t expecting, such as an egret or a tactical nuclear weapon.

Never mind the new Terminator movie with Christian Bale. Anyone who’s tried to use one of these automated checkouts knows that in fact this is the beginning of the rise of the machines. You won’t have to go to the cinema to watch the famously cross and shouty actor battling cyborgs, because at your command, dear reader, I am ready to lead the human resistance in an epic battle.

Together we shall fight a dystopian future where these self-service checkouts have become sentient and are hell-bent on annihilating the population of the world by deliberately pretending not to recognise things, when all we wanted to do was buy a sandwich and an apple for lunch. Who’s with me?

Jon Holmes features on BBC 6 Music on Saturdays at 2-4pm. His live stand-up show Rock Star Babylon is warming up for the Edinburgh Festival