Rage against the (checkout) machine: Why I won't do self-service with a smile

Self-service isn't self-serving for those who struggle with technology. For some of us, it's downright impossible.

Most of the stores I shop at are clearing out more and more space for self-service checkout. I’ve never used it. As a card-carrying union member of the working class, I have solid and articulate objections to the concept, if anyone wants to hear them, but mostly I am fulfilling my obligation as an older citizen to be an old grump.

I don’t like self-service. It sounds dirty. Plus, I’m no good at it. I learned that years ago, the first time I encountered an unstaffed pay station in a parking lot. Against all odds, I managed to navigate the buttons and introduced my credit card to the machine. I even got the card back out again. I looked around for a ticket to come chunking out of the box, but there wasn’t anything to display on my car. So I wandered off the lot secure in the belief that some collaboration had occurred between my card, the machine, and a global positioning satellite, and it had sent a halo of paidness over my car. (When you don’t know how things work, it seems possible.)

It hadn’t. A whisper of a receipt had wafted into a slot at the bottom of the machine, intended for my dashboard, and perhaps the next person had gotten it, or not, but my windshield was wearing a $40 ticket when I came back. 

I sent a note to the authorities explaining that I had indeed paid, and was merely a muttonhead, but I used good syntax and spelled everything correctly, and they were not moved. If I’d gone in person, my shortcomings would have been more evident. I would have had my ticket waived in five minutes, plus maybe a little something extra to tide me over until my caregiver arrived.

I guess if I knew how anything works I might learn to be a little snappier about these things. 

We have light-rail in our town now, and I haven’t used it much because I’ve got feet, and time. But I did try to buy a ticket once or twice. They’ve got machines right on the platform. Two or three trains will go by while I’m prodding the pay box for soft spots. First, of course, I look for the place to put in my coins. It’s not obvious. But it’s there. They’d really prefer you use something else. And it turns out two quarters doesn’t get you anywhere anymore.

I find another portal to the ticket world and start hammering away at buttons, but that’s rarely successful either. I always think the machine has just quit on me, but it turns out that it’s waiting for me to tell it “OK” before it will go on. Everything’s got self-esteem issues these days.

“OK,” I press hopefully. Still no ticket. Then I remember that most people on the train have their tickets jammed right into their phones somehow. I don’t know how they get in there, but I take out my phone and pass it over the machine, up, down, along the sides and underneath, hoping something will go “blip.” Instead a paper towel shoots out the bottom, and apparently I’ve also ordered the third season of “House of Cards.” 

And this, I think darkly, is a machine in my native language in my hometown.

Well, crumb. They say older people are set in their ways, which is a kinder way to say we’re cranky. But it is true that not everything new is an improvement. We’ve got the perspective to know what’s been lost when we’re riveted to our phones, oblivious to the birds and blossoms and breezes that are our true wealth and heritance. The nods to strangers, the smiles, all the little tugs on the gathering thread of our humanity – nice weather, cool T-shirt, who’s a good boy? – too often, they’re missing too. We’ve ditched the present to be somewhere else, sometime else, with someone else.

OK, boomer. But if I were to be honest, a lot of my own crankiness is rooted in feeling stupid.

That’s really at the heart of it when I scowl at the self-service lines and rail against taking jobs from working people and farming out labor to myself, unpaid.

But still I will not do the self-service line at the grocery store. I will not. I’d probably scan my vegetables too hard and get premature salsa. No, sir: I want human hands on my fruit. Someone whose shirt I’m on a first-name basis with.