harmless novelties
innocence, before death march
of progress gathered
What else could we be talking about but self-checkout at the store.
As Adrian Chiles wrote in his article, Want a glimpse of dystopia? Visit the self-service checkouts:
Back then there were about two dozen staffed checkouts, in those days of innocence before the death march of progress gathered pace.
A handful of self-checkouts appeared; a handful of human ones vanished. At first we saw them as harmless novelties.
They were never all in operation, and those that were rarely worked properly.
I used to bet my kids that I could get any one or two items from Walmart in under 5 minutes.
The secret was moving fast and the little used self check out lanes.
My wife would say she needed milk or one of the kids needed a poster board or a glue stick for a school project and the game was afoot.
I would drive to the Walmart and park near the garden section and enter a back door and sweep round inside in a wide circle to the correct department, grab my item, hit that self checkout with debit card in hand and be out the door, always under 5 minutes.
The kids got into it as well and would run along with me.
Once my daughter D’asia said she would get the check out all set for me and ran on ahead and pressed the touch screen to start the process.
I got there to scan the item in question and the machine, in computer voice said, “presione completar compra”.
I looked down to see a screen I didn’t recognize.
D’asia had pressed the button to continue the transaction in Spanish.
I was lost.
I looked at Daddles and she just shrugged.
I took a chance and pressed a few more buttons.
Whatever the buttons said, they set off a beeping that got the attention of a human being.
The human being in the form of a Walmart Sales person who wanted to turn the beeping off but all the prompts were in Spanish.
We were both hopelessly helpless or helplessly hopeless in the face of bilingual computer voiced madness.
Together we got the machine to cooperate but the sales person looked at my daughter with one finger pointing at her and said, “DON’T DO THAT AGAIN.”
Took us about 15 minutes.
As Mr. Chiles writes:
“… the remainder invariably had a glitch in store for you.
Only the other day I had a torrid time with some pitiful, dried-out geraniums on a three-for-£5 offer.
They just wouldn’t scan.
I got them for nothing in the end, but they all died anyway.
Why does that last line make me think of a coming epitaph for us all in so many ways.
I got them for nothing in the end.
But they all died anyway.
Dystopian indeed.
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No Haiku For You 