PERHAPS it was my slightly obsessive nature which meant I quite enjoyed the job.

Every evening I would pull all the cans, the soup tins and the Pot Noodles to the front of their respective shelves before ‘facing’ them – turning them round so their logos were clearly visible to the passing customer.

It’s a trick of the trade to make a half-empty supermarket look full, and to save the punter time when they’re deciding which particular brand of tinned salmon tickles their fancy.

This humble task was my lot in life for a couple of nights a week for two and a half years straddling the end of the last century and the beginning of this one.

I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say the experience made a man of me, but a few years stacking shelves and working on the till in some of Belfast’s less glamorous areas will knock a bit of sense into anyone.

My days of facing baked bean tins at the Co-op gives me the right to speak with some authority about Iain Duncan Smith’s assertion on Sunday that some people think they are “too good” to stack shelves.

The work and pensions secretary was reacting to his defeat in the courts last week at the hands of 24-year-old geology graduate Cait Reilly.

Like many of her generation, her degree proved to be a passport to nowhere more exciting than the dole queue.

In 2011, Mr Duncan Smith’s department ordered Miss Reilly to take on two weeks of unpaid shelf stacking at a Poundland in Birmingham, forcing her to give up her voluntary work at a museum in the process.

She sued and last week the Appeal Court found that the Department for Work and Pensions had breached rules on forced labour by threatening to cut off her benefits

A wiser man than Mr Duncan Smith would have chalked it up to experience and got on with their life, but the former Tory leader has taken defeat about as graciously as a three-year-old with a sore head.

“There is a group of people out there who think they’re too good for this kind of stuff,” he thundered on Sunday, in reference to Miss Reilly.

This was a strange allegation to make against a woman who currently works part-time in a supermarket – though with the crucial distinction that she is actually paid for her labour now. She must have one of those job type things that Mr Duncan Smith is always going on about.

From this solid base camp of illogic, the work and pensions secretary felt ready to attempt an ascent of Mount Idiocy.

Mr Duncan Smith, a man who is an actual real-life cabinet minister with a red box and everything, decided he could win the argument for his ‘back-to-work’ plan by comparing the merits of a shelf-stacker and a geologist.

I’ll quote him verbatim to give an idea of the intellectual rigour behind his thoughts.

“The next time somebody goes in – those smart people who say there’s something wrong with this – they go into their supermarket, ask themselves this simple question, when they can’t find the food they want on the shelves, who is more important, them, the geologist, or the person who stacked the shelves?”

First of all, this is not really a fair game of shelf-stacker versus geologist, as Mr Duncan Smith has given the supermarket worker home advantage by envisaging a not-enough-food-on-the-shelves scenario.

Like European football ties, these job comparison games really need to be played over two legs.

If he was being fair, Mr Duncan Smith should have followed-up with: “You see that volcano over there? Is it about to erupt? Who’s going to be able to tell you that? A good old down-to-earth geologist or some hoity-toity shelf-stacker?”

The second logical fallacy in Mr Duncan Smith’s game is that he doesn’t seem to realise that the unnamed target of his ire is both a geology graduate and a supermarket worker. So when he asks if the geologist is more important than the shelf-stacker, he’s really asking if Miss Reilly is more important than Miss Reilly.

And now for the third tiny problem with Mr Duncan Smith’s argument. He tried to be pro-shelf-stacker and yet he chose a scenario in which the supermarket worker didn’t do their job properly.

How come the customer “can’t find food on the shelves”? Is it because the shelf-stacker was too busy day-dreaming about volcanoes to get on with putting the baked beans out?

I shall have to go now. The air up here at the summit of Mount Idiocy is getting thin and it’s hard work keeping up with Mr Duncan Smith’s logic.

Things were so much easier when I was just a humble shelf-stacker.