After days and weeks of standing outside, shivering in the cold, the sleep still firmly wedged between my eyes, waiting for the 7:40 bus.
I’m not even sure why I used to get that bus. Maybe it was because the 7:30 bus never turned up, and I never quite manage to tell my legs to walk across the road when the 7:35 was coming the other way. However, I finally managed to sort it out and get up in time to get outside for 7:30. Still, a lot of the time that bus never shows up, and I’m still stuck with the 7:40 afterall. The 7:40, by the way, is the bus filled with all the annoying schoolkids that have their conversations filled with expletives, not for impact, but because those make up practically the entirety of their vocabulary.
Because I’m getting the 7:30 bus, it generally misses most of the school children (apart from the cute innocent ones that don’t know what swearing is and are generally quiet… Okay, maybe not quite that good) and also the traffic. This causes me to arrive in town to go to the bus station about 25 minutes before my bus to work is due.
Anyway, enough banter about annoying school children.
Now, as I may have mentioned a couple of times before, lunch where I work, in this small, quaint, pensioner-infested village is completely shit. It’s so expensive, and there’s really no selection. Sandwiches do become a bit boring, especially when they’re not tuna sandwiches which are hand-made right infront of you.
So, due to my early arrival in town, I thought I’d go to Tesco and buy something nice for lunch. Soup, for example. So, in to Tesco I go and go about my mission for lunch. A very deep search through the isles of calories for whatever takes my fancy. Eventually I make my selection and go to the checkout, and that’s when it happens.
“Where the fuck have the checkouts gone?” is exactly what ran through my mind. My Mother (who happened to be in Tesco with me at the time) pointed out that the cashiers had been sacked and then offered new jobs in training Tesco’s new self-service system. Basically, all of the checkouts have been removed, and instead there are a load of wall machines. There’s still one or two checkouts for cigarettes and the likes, but otherwise you have to use one of these machines. You could see people with their items hesitating to walk up to them, but doing so quite shakily when a member of staff looked at them and arm-flagged them to these odd machines.
I naturally walked over to one, not being afraid of technology, and began to use it. It functions in much the same way as a normal checkout does, only the scanner has a much bigger area, so it’s a lot easier to scan barcodes. Any individual items are select from the touch-screen menu which is reasonably well organised. Cash is entered in coins or notes on the side, whilst the machine calculates how much more you need to enter, and change is deposited after. That’s not the bad bit, though.
The bad bit is once you’ve scanned the item or entered it via touchscreen, you get the stupid recorded voice saying “Please enter the item into the bagging area”. This means you’ve got to fuck around with a carrier bag, even if you don’t want one (I assume the bagging area weighs the items on it so that it can detemine whether you’ve placed the item there, or actually scanned a box of cookies and placed a 10lb turkey in the bag). There’s a slight delay between scanning the item and the disembodied voice instructing you to do that, and if you do it too fast then the now alarmed disembodied voice screeches “Illegal item placed in the bagging area, please call for assistance!”, which is almost embarrassing. Well, it’d be embarrassing if I actually cared.
This is one of the first actual incidents of machines replacing people that I’ve actually witnessed. I understand it happens everywhere in lots of industries, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it as public as this. I wonder if all of those cashiers actually lost those jobs, or if they got taken in to train customers and other staff on how to use their new machines.
What intrigues me is what’s stopping someone from only scanning 2 items and actually taking 3. I’m assuming that all cigarettes and alcohol has to be paid for at the couple of checkouts remaining, for identification purposes. Perhaps we’ll all get ID cards, the machines will take a picture of us, compare it to the code registered to our card which is compared to a picture of us in a database. Who knows?
All in all, a long entry cut short, Tesco have made a load of space, but destroyed a lot of peoples souls (especially those who have problems with computers or math) and have put a lot of people on the spot. These machines, which function on the pure basics of stupidy are far too annoying for anyone who works in a world of technology, and far too overwhelming for someone who has never used a keyboard and mouse.
Talking of keyboards and mice, a woman on one of the Explore IT training courses at work the other week (quite an elderly woman) was complaining that her mouse wasn’t working. It turns out she wasn’t actually moving her hand.
“Sorry Miss, as soon as we get some mice with ESP capabilities, I’ll let you know!”.