Yesterday I was in the Workers Café on Upper Street eating an omelette, when I encountered the future. Or at least it felt like the future, for a couple of seconds anyway.

The café has a TV on the wall which shows Sky News, whose stream of “breaking news” is regularly interrupted by ad breaks. It was during these ad breaks that I had my brush with the world of tomorrow.

My eye was lazily watching the screen when an advert appeared for the Samsung Galaxy S, a new Android-powered mobile phone. The usual stuff happened – the phone was lit in an appealing fashion, it spun around invitingly, a disembodied hand did things with the screen.

One of the things the disembodied hand did during the advert was open up Google Maps. And in Google Maps, the street being shown was the street I was actually on – “The A1, Upper Street”.

But I didn’t think, “what a strange coincidence”. Instead my first reaction was to assume that the advert was somehow geo-targeted, dynamically displaying the TV’s location on the phone’s screen.

A second later however I realised that while this might be technically possible today it’s unlikely that a greasy spoon café, however venerable, is equipped with that sort of kit. It’s also unlikely that something as expensive as dynamically geo-targeted video would be used so casually, to show a particular street on a phone’s screen for around half a second on a daytime TV advert.

The feeling I was left with was a strange one. My initial, subconscious assumption was that the ad was geo-targeted rather than that an unlikely coincidence had taken place, so I was a bit disappointed when I realised I was expecting too much from the cafés TV and Sky’s ad platform.

So what looked like the future turned out to be a false positive. The ad break ended, Sky News went back to its gentle newsy clamour, and I went back to my omelette.

In The Trial and The Castle, novels by Franz Kafka, the protagonists confront institutions that are inscrutable, complex and seemingly omnipotent. And within these institutions, a “power law of terror” is at work – at each layer of the institution the terror levels increase exponentially, as expressed by this allegoric doorman in The Trial:

I am powerful. And I am only the lowest door-keeper. But from room to room stand door-keepers each more powerful than the last. The mere aspect of the third is more than even I can bear.

Of course, this “power law of terror” shouldn’t be confused with Bruce Schneier’s Power Law of Terrorism.

They’ve opened up a Planet Organic on Essex Road. I went in there yesterday to see what was going on.

There was some free food on offer, a dry crumbly bread-like substance, but I’m too suspicious to comfortably take free stuff (“there must be a catch…”) so I gave it a miss.

While I was in the shop my boss called and I ended up having a phone conversation about quantitative user research while hanging around near some organically-farmed fish. What a cliché.

Modern retail design is science rather than an art, and companies like Planet Organic know what they’re doing. As predictable as one of Pavlov’s dogs, I ended up with a fairly full shopping basket.

While in the store the idea of making tacos had somehow entered my mind and this led to me fumbling for things like tortillas, tomato puree and crushed chillis. I even bought a yellow fin tuna steak. I’m still trying to figure out what to do with this.

When I got to the till I smiled wryly at a sign for the staff saying, “People are already trying to pay with counterfeit £50 notes – please look out”. Obviously the clash of cultures that became inevitable when Planet Organic decided to open a branch on Essex Road was already in full swing.

As my purchases were clocked up, the totals seemed a bit different from the prices on the items. Then I realised, they operate an American system of displaying prices without VAT, meaning that everything was in fact 17.5% more expensive than I’d originally thought. At that point I started wishing that I had some counterfeit £50 notes!