ash begins a section called Older Letters. When available, she has provided the dates they were written.
TOO MUCH TECHNOLOGY 6 9 99
The other day I buy a salad and fries at a fast food restaurant. Simple transaction. But the young man punches in the wrong sized fries and has to consult two coworkers to make the correction. What flavor salad dressing? I get home and there’s no salad dressing. My fault for not inspecting the bag before I left the premises.
Today it’s a carton of cigarettes at a convenience store. The young woman rings up the wrong brand and when I point out the mistake she shrugs. “The price is close enough, right?” She really says that. Actually the brand I want is $3.00 less. So she attempts to void the sale. Since there’s a credit card involved it becomes complicated, or so she insists. Should it be? I don’t know, but I start directing customers behind me to the other line. When she finally gets a total it’s clearly too high. Oops! She forgot to subtract the coupon. She gives me the difference in cash.
Good thing my bank account isn’t too tight.
I used to make disparaging remarks. Now I don’t bother (or dare). Kids will spit in your food order, someone once told me, if you give them a hard time with it. But that’s not the reason. It just seems futile. You blame them; they don’t care enough to become indignant. Or they blame the cash register that didn’t do as it was told. Or the ever popular “I just work here. They don’t pay me enough to learn the hard stuff.” Anyway, that’s what machines are for, to do the “hard stuff” for them, to think for them so they don’t have to think, or learn, or make simple calculations in their heads or on paper.And it’s the easy stuff, too. A teenager asks me about a.m. and p.m.: which is morning and which is afternoon. Another asks, Which is greater, one half or one third. They laugh at my startled face.
It’s pervasive. And it’s frightening. An entire generation coming of age – X, Y, Z, whatever it is now – has been raised on technology. This means one entire generation is dependent on technology and helpless without it. God help them – and those of us forced to rely on their service – when the power goes out on January 1, 2000, or whenever.