technology-induced atrophy

[sergebroom]

This morning I went to the nearby bigbox hardware store. This is the first time I've had so much fun buying Christmas lights because, when I got to the selfserve checkout machines, I was told that the whole store's computer system was down. I find that funny? Well, it wasn't funny to see the human cashier try to remember how to fill up a receipt and be unable to figure out the tax. The funny part is that I had to calculate it for the store.

Comments

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

amount x 1.0775 (or whatever your tax rate is). Where's the hard part?

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's 1.0685 here. As for what's hard about that, I don't know either. First, the cashier had to be told that this was what she needed to do. After that, she kept coming up with numbers that were way too high or way too low, even though she was using a pocket calculator, so I offered to do it for her.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

hat being said, it's rather worrisome to realize that so many things are Black Boxes for most people.

[julia-here.livejournal.com]

(Icon = carpenter of my imagination, based on actual carpenter)

Two, no three things:

1. The skill set I miss mostis counting change properly, which on top of everything else results in the coins being on the bottom in your hand, rather than atop the bills and in danger of being dumped on the floor, so that I must quickly close my hand and stick everything in my pocket so itdoesn't escape.

2. When I was young, we would go to the hardware store and they would have, always, exactly what we needed, and it would be easy to find and not packaged so that we had to buy either ten times what we needed or pay a major premium. Yesterday we went to Home Depot and Lowe's in search of a low-clearance ceiling light for the dining room of the sort where the shades open downward for maximum light and minimum moth-trappage; we looked at an acre of light fixtures and got glare headaches but found nothing.

3. Was it you who linked meto a wonderful Japanese saw once? Do you still have the link? Ifinally have the budget room to buy it, but that set of data is on the limeMac withthedead power supply.

Julia, giving up on the "oh, I'll get that hard drive out and recover the data" solution after three years.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I guess the Big Boxes would call their setups 'Efficiency'. At least, when I go to that specific BB, I can find people to help me when help is needed. What's funny though is that, in spite of their size, they have a limited selection, where some items are concerned - for example, hose rels.

As for a Japanese saw... Hmmm... No, that wasn't me.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

We had this happen when part of the bookgroup went to a restaurant. They couldn't give us our bills because they didn't know how to make them up -- and the city's restaurant tax is 10%. (There were a lot of people who said folks would go outside the boundary of our small city if we raised our restaurant tax that high, but they were wrong. At the same time, they had to do away with a law that said if you bought a small milk at the grocery, it was restaurant, because a lot of single people buy small milk for home.)

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

One couldn't get an easier tax to figure out and they still fluubed that? It makes one wonder how they got thru high-school. Too much reliance on pocket calculators?

[miltonthales.livejournal.com]

I worked for a major Waikiki hotel for a couple of years. It was so firmly automated that had the power gone down (and the backup generators along with it) the place would have been in real trouble. It had electronic room keys (no backup old-fashioned ones), no wall of slots to put the backup keys or telephone messages (also fully automated) into if needed, etcetera. At the time it had 781 rooms and ran about 85% occupied on any given day.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

That hotel sounds like something designed by the morons usually found in a movie inspired by Michael Crichton.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Yep, doesn't it? What about cellphone calculators?

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

No matter what it is that they use not to do basic math, the bottom line is that they don't even understand the concept of what it is that they're having a machine do for them.