So it turns out those rip roaring headaches my friend Lolly has been having aren’t eyestrain. No, that would be too fucking easy.
The neurosurgeon says the prognosis is good, probably it’s benign because of where it is and her age. Given that her other choice besides brain surgery is blindness and then death, she picked the surgery.
Here’s your brain tumor. Happy 22nd birthday.
Just fuck…
Yes, it’s that time of year. And we officially begin the long slide into winter. The good news: I already have the February vacation booked and paid for.
* The autumnal equinox was at 09:51 GMT/05:51 EDT today.
An ill wind blows through RetailTown and it’s bringing with it more bad user interface design than you can possibly imagine. Yes, the dreaded self-check kiosk has multiplied in that pod-like fashion so common to bad ideas initiated by bottom-line oriented MBAs. Not only do we have them in grocery stores and Home Depot but now they’ve started to appear in drug stores making the buying vitamins, shampoo, and tampons experience that much more deadly.
I’m not sure what bothers me more about self-check kiosks the bad user interface design or the encroachment on my shopping experience that they represent. Let’s start with the user interface design.
I’ve written about some of the design flaws of the kiosks at the grocery store but lately I’ve been taking a hard look at how I’m forced to interact with the machine. Assuming I start my transaction by scanning my items, I’m forced to interact with a touch-screen monitor, probably about a 13incher, if I want to buy anything that requires weighing. This touch-screen is where I enter my alternate id number for my discount card if I have one. The touch-screen is also where I tell the machine how I’m going to pay. And here is where it gets really stupid.
In order to pay for my purchase I have to do a minimum of three steps:
These three steps assume that you’re 1) paying cash, and 2) have exact change. You add the fourth step of getting change if the amount you put in isn’t exactly your total. If you want to pay by credit card the process is even worse: you’re forced to interact with not one, not two, but three separate interfaces two of which require you to give the machine redundant information. Assuming you want to use a credit card the process goes like this:
Interface #1 (Touch Screen)
Interface #2 (Swipe Terminal)
Interface #3 (Signature Pad)
Back to Interface #1 (Touch Screen)
Setting aside the user interface problem, there is the other issue: how business is using its customers as free labor. Yes, they’re playing off the “saved time” perception. We all know that doesn’t really work. These things malfunction so often you’re probably better off waiting for an actual checker in an actual line. And you can’t really blame business for trying to increase profits. They are, after all, in it for the money. No, more insidious is the marketing of increasing their bottom line.
Bloom is a grocery store chain that is spreading like kudzu north from the Carolinas. Since they’re strictly regional at this point their advertising hasn’t spread across the country. Be thankful. Be very, very thankful for the marketing geniuses at Bloom have committed two unpardonable sins: they’ve recycled a Partridge Family song for their jingle, and they’ve attempted to make fluffing the corporate bottom line fun.
Bloom’s advertisements consist of employees decked out in khakis and corporate polo shirts dancing around the store singing about the joys of shopping at Bloom, how you’ll leave happy because of all the great choices and products (Hello world, there’s a song that we’re singing/Come on shop happy). Annoying at best until they got to this most recent round of ads which don’t just imply that it’s more convenient to use the self-check out kiosk. Oh no, they outright say that it’s fun.
So not only have you removed a level of service but now I’m supposed to be happy about having to do your work for you? I’m supposed to enjoy not getting even the least little bit of human interaction in my spending and consumption process? Next thing they’ll be telling us is that it’s good exercise to cut the products out of the plastic wrapped palettes that are lying around the store because they won’t hire enough stockers.
To subvert the seven step, redundified process that is paying for your purchase with a credit card at a self-check kiosk instead of signing my name this week I wrote on the signature pad: This process is stupid.
They approved the transaction anyway.
I am lucky enough to live in a city that has decent public transportation coverage. We have a subway system and a network of buses that combined will take you pretty much anywhere you want to go. And because parking and gas are so expensive, and because people in this city really just do not know how to drive, I am a frequent rider of our public transportation system.
I’m also a little paranoid about germs after last year’s run-in with digestive system killing antibiotics which is how I find myself frequently patronizing the restroom to just wash my hands. Now, I ask you, what is so threatening about someone how comes into a restroom just to wash her hands?
I’ve critically examined myself in the mirror after an instance in which some woman gives me the hairy eyeball and rapidly exits the ladies’ room as I stand there soaping up my mitts. Let’s see: not wearing a N@MBLA t-shirt; haven’t peed myself and left wet foot prints on the floor in the way in; bathed recently; having a really great hair life. Yeah, I look basically presentable.
So why is it that most women seem to find inconceivable the idea that you could simply want to wash your hands before eating a meal (and often a meal that comes with free crusty bread and fabulous olive oil in which to dip said crusty bread)?
Is there some secret code that straight girls get taught that I missed out on ’cause I didn’t go to all those straight girl meetings in high school that tells them that women who come into the ladies’ room and just wash their hands are really doing the equivalent of the foot tap/wave under the stall sequence that seems to be so popular among gay men who are into public sex?
Or is it simply that we’re all so straight-jacketed by our perceptions of what we see as normal behavior that it has reached the point that any behavior we wouldn’t normally engage in seems threatening? I hope this isn’t the case. As the world gets more crowded we’re all going to have to learn to live a little better with everyone else’s foibles and twisted idea of what constitutes normal. Our only other choice is fascism and that really isn’t much of a choice at all.
I’ve been thinking about fear a lot over the past couple of years, what it is, what it’s good for, when it becomes a hindrance, and as a result I’ve been looking critically at a lot of human behavior in general, and a lot of my own behavior specifically. It’s a hard thing to face, and may be a huge leap, but at this point I’d venture to say that fully 75% of everything people do is motivated by fear of one kind or another.
Fear of punishment is the basis for most of our legal system. More than not we don’t break the law not because we respect that the law exists to defend what is right but because we fear the cost of getting caught breaking the law. You can see this in practice every day in the way people “obey” traffic laws like the speed limit and the right turn on red after stop rule. If there is little or no chance you’ll be punished for breaking the law then why not disregard it when it is convenient for you to do so? No penalty equals no fear.
Fear can keep us in jobs we don’t like, eating shit from a bad boss who we can visibly see is incompetent, jumping through administrative hoops in the equivalent of a circus simply to get the benefits we were promised when we were hired, taking on more work than we are being paid to do because if we say no then we’re not “team players” and we might not get the raise we justly deserve simply for doing well the jobs we were hired to do. Because we fear the consequences of leaving a bad job, which could including unemployment or landing in a job where the conditions are even worse, we stay in a situation that is demoralizing at best and soul crushing at worst.
We’ll stay in unfilling relationships for the same reason: fear of the unknown. Is it better to stay with someone who doesn’t quite meet all your needs but meets some or most of them than it is to risk being alone? After all, our entire couple-obsessed, breeder-biased, wedding-crazy culture tells us that only losers are single, and only crazy losers are single and happy to be so.
Fear of ridicule or ostracism causes new college or high school students to wonder not “how can I get the most out of this experience” but “will I fit in?” and it keeps us toeing the line on social conventions that make absolutely no practical sense (someone justify for me, please, why it’s OK for men to be hairy but women “should” spend thousands of dollars a year and hundreds of hours on hair removal…there is no practical or logical reason for it). Homophobia, racism, the illegal immigrant debate, these are all social manifestations of fear of the unknown.
And while fear may be one of the three innate human emotions – anger and love being the other two – fear is simply a message. Conquering fear isn’t all that hard. It only takes accepting one tiny but very hard truth.
You’re already dead.
In America, at least, our medical industry, our fashion industry, our banking debt industry, our beauty care industry, and, increasingly, our government are based on the idea that if we simply make the right moves at the right time we can not just stave off the inevitable and prolong our useful lives but, and this is the sneaky, nasty, underlying psychology of human perception, that we can stay young forever (and perhaps never die at all). But the simple truth is that for each of us our death is out there waiting. Whether it’s a car accident, at home in bed of “natural causes,” in a sterile hospital room, or as a direct result of our own risky behavior (like drug addiction or sex with anonymous strangers in public rest rooms), each of us will meet death at some point. So why not proceed as if we already have?
Why do we cling so hard to the status quo trying to preserve what was instead of living in the now and dealing with what is?
If life is as fragile as all our persuasive industries tell us it is – for the love of God, don’t eat that Dorito! you might give yourself diabetes, or pre-diabetes which can lead to diabetes so you need to carefully monitor whatever you put in your mouth (I’m waiting for them to come up with pre-pre-diabetes, you know, for infants who nurse too much) – why then do we treat it as if it were permanent? Why do we hold grudges? Why do we figure that there is “always tomorrow” to do what we want, to travel, to follow our dreams? Why do we not say what we think and tell the people who annoy us to buzz off and the people we love that they’re important?
Why do we not treat our lives as a gift? We don’t really own them, after all, and their length isn’t guaranteed, so why do we let fear constrain us, push us around, and run our lives?
I wish I had the answers, but I don’t. Just questions and a growing comfort with the fact that I will cease to be eventually.