TIFPA I

(Source)

Uh, what's that again Sarge?

TIFPA, Things I Find Particularly Annoying. I intend this to be a continuing, sporadic series of posts. Each will be marked by a Roman numeral, this being the first is adorned with an "I" - subsequent posts in the series will have "II," "III," "IV," etc. When (if) I get to number 50, I won't as the recent major football spectacle did, use 50. The post will be TIFPA L. Which, no doubt, will confuse some but I'm sure the well-educated and informed crowd here at The Chant will handle in stride.

(Some of us, ahem, Old NFO, actually learned to count using Roman numerals. So Murph has hinted at, more times than I can remember. And yes, TIFPA has been added to the Acronym Page. Yes, in alphabetical order...)

Anyhoo...

Let's launch TIFPA I with my rant/whine/diatribe/tirade concerning the ever growing presence of self checkout stands in various food and big box store emporiums.

While I personally have no problems operating this marvel (sic) of modern technology, I can't say the same for other members of my species. And therein lies the source of my fulminations vis-à-vis this ubiquitous piece of machinery.

Why would someone who is uncomfortable with technology even think about using a self checkout machine? First they stand there staring at it (thinking perhaps that the machine will talk to them, maybe), then they realize that no one is going to assist them. Hence the "self" in self checkout.

So they wave their first item at the machine. Nothing happens. So they do it again, and again, nothing happens.

Dumbfounded, they stare at the machine, then the item in their hand, then back at the machine. That's when some helpful soul will explain the concept of the barcode to them, you know, this thing -

(Source)

"What does that do?" They just have to know.

"Well, it is read by the machine and the machine can tell what the item is and how much it costs."

"Really?"

"Really."

"How does it do that?"

"Magic."

[grumble, grumble, smarta$$, grumble, grumble, stupid computers...]

And so it goes.

Most people, once they figure out the secret, get pretty good at it. Until the window on the bottom of the machine gets too filthy to read anything. In some stores, not all, they have an employee dedicated to assisting customers at the self checkout. Which I guess would make those a semi-self checkout. (Some of those employees, though dedicated, as in allocated to, that task aren't, shall we say very dedicated.) Those folks will also (occasionally) wipe down the glass so that it can actually read the barcode.

Sometimes I will point out to these customers who are struggling with the filthy, yet-to-be-cleaned-by-the-allocated-but-apparently-not-dedicated-employee, that there is a horizontal glass (ya know the filthy one) and a vertical glass. Puzzled they will look at the machine as if they have just discovered something wondrous and particularly exotic.

"What's the vertical one for?"

"Same thing as the horizontal one."

"Why have two?"

"Why not?"

[grumble, grumble, smarta$$, grumble, grumble, stupid computers...]

Yeah, something like that...

There are folks who just never get it, but apparently they enjoy not having to interact with a fellow human, or have someone bag their stuff, so they will wheel their massively overloaded shopping cart to the self checkout and spend the next hour trying to scan things, having the machine tell them "the bagging area is full, please bag some items..." Which they will do, after studying the item in their hand, the machine, the bagging area, their shopping cart, the item in their hand once more, before they sigh and go bag some items.

As the shopping cart is still heavily laden they now ponder where they are going to put the items they just bagged. For the self checkout stands don't really have this long belt for you to dump your stuff while someone else rings it up, someone else bags the stuff and either puts it into your original shopping cart or stacks it at the end of the register where (unlike the self checkout) there is ample room for four or five bags full o' stuff.

The number of self checkout lanes has grown in my local grocery emporium since they first introduced this novel (hey, we don't have to pay the machines!!!) concept. While there are still a "crap ton" of the normal, manned by a human, checkout lanes, the store seems to not want to man (person?) those. (Because they do have to pay the humans. A key point here in all this self checkout stuff.) Unless it's a peak shopping day. Such as when The Missus Herself makes her bi-weekly shopping run or it's the day before another predicted (but non-occurring) Snowmageddon which the Weather Channel is fond of predicting.

At that point the store is mobbed with the senior set who will purchase enough water, milk, and bread to last through an Ice Age, let alone a snow storm which may or may not occur and which may or may not be like The Great Blizzard of 1978!!! (Which to tell the truth was godawful bad, according to the old-timers in these parts. I wouldn't know, I was on Okinawa. Where it never snowed. Ever.)

So when I hit the store there will be two or three manned registers and all five self checkout aisles open for business. Back in the old days the senior set were terrified of those self checkout registers.

Maybe with good reason.

Now though they are overconfident and merrily hit those self checkout machines like they know what they're doing.

Not.

It's quicker sometimes to go to the human manned register (where someone is arguing that "this week's flyer shows that as 75% off, I'm sure...") and they have enough groceries to end hunger in some small countries. And when they finally have all their items rung up, totaled, bagged, and carted, they dig through their purse for their checkbook and ask the cashier...

"Do you have a pen I can borrow?"

Or the old guys who pull out their little plastic change holder and start digging for that two cents they need. Which they seldom have and which they will finally ask for all of their coins back and so that they can then dig for a paper one dollar bill, which they swear they had this morning. Before they went to the coffee shop where everyone else had to wait while they decided what size coffee they wanted and wondered should they have a donut or a muffin. Which they paid for with a five dollar bill, their last one dollar bill, a quarter, a nickel, and the two pennies they will look for later at the grocery store.

Yeah, self checkout stands and the people who don't know how to use them, but insist on doing so anyway.

TIFPA...