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Sunday morning at the bakery. — — Well, Sunday morning at the second bakery because the one I normally use apparently isn’t open on Sundays anymore. Of course I’m touchy at that time of the day. Or – to put it positively, as I have been told I should – I am more aware. Aware of all the crap surrounding me.
Part of it is the cashier they are using in the store. A fancypants touchscreeny thing. Of course touchscreen devices aren’t as efficient to use as devices with actual buttons would be, so everything is slower. But that’s not even my point here. It rather is that – invariably – fancypants cashiers in a situation like a bakery’s just aren’t particularly good at the job they are doing. Staff have to find the button for each item they sell you. Different members of staff have to compete to share the same machine, thus introducing extra waits. What, may I ask, is the advantage over doing everything without spending thousands on such machines? You know where staff simply know the prices of the different bread rolls by heart and add them up in their head as you order them.
Or, if staff should be computationally challenged, what about letting them use a pocket calculator? Heck, each of them could bring their own making the whole business very modern and efficient. And they’d be quicker. If they need to ring up each sale in the register to keep some beancounter happy (I suspect they are the ones pushing those ‘modern’ machines to make their jobs easier at the expense of customer service quality), they could just do that with the final amount or so. On a cheap register of which they could have enough for all staff. Heck, there should be plenty of ways to do better than what they are doing.
And, yeah, on my way out I almost ran into the sliding doors. Because even after decades of trying those friggin’ engineers haven’t managed to build sliding doors which open reliably and quickly when you approach them. As that’s pretty much the only thing those doors are supposed to do, I declare the whole automatic sliding door business a failure. A manual door would be much better because it leaves me in control rather than putting me in a position where I have to time my next movement according to whatever speed some device considers adequate.
So forget about the Warp drive – if there’s one cool thing in Star Trek, it’s that they have sliding doors which actually work. I wonder whether there are records of how many times the actors ran straight into the doors when filming those series. I imagine that actors needed to unlearn the hesitance which real-world sliding doors teach you when playing on the set.
Amusingly enough, those automatic Star Trek doors weren’t really automatic at all — they were manipulated manually by offscreen stagehands. There exist bloopers of collisions and the like due to crew members missing cues and/or doors sticking. :)
Ah, don’t ruin the illusion, Dave!
I’d quite like to see those collisions…
