It is fun for a hillbilly to go shopping in the big city. So many choices! But I lost track of how many times I told the checkout-human that I was not "in their system" and no, I would not give them my phone number.
Harbor Freight has always been obnoxious and aggressive about that. At least the biological unit who checked me out had a sense of humor about it.
Later, something happened as obnoxious as McDonald's replacing their checkout-humans with those damn electronic kiosks, where the customer gets to fumble with a multi-step menu until they finally memorize it.
At one of the big gas station chains, I went in to pay cash as I usually do. But instead of just giving the human a 20 dollar bill and saying, "Pump #7", he made me go to this iPad-looking thing, and fumble around with an arbitrary and non-intuitive sequence of steps in a multi-layered menu.
He had to step around the counter and help me. It took us 5 minutes to do what used to take 5 seconds. But this is "Progress", you see. Well, at least it didn't make me enter a phone number or email address.
I am so tired of the digital age. In olden times, you turned the knob clockwise. Usually that made a detectable difference. Then you might turn it a little more. That all seemed obvious. But the digital world keeps forcing you into some new multi-step menu, with a complex sequence of buttons to push. Even if you play along and memorize it, the sequence of buttons will change in six months when "Rev 2.1" comes out.
This bullshit is not progress. It is all about data-mining of customers and eliminating jobs for human beings. And constant fiddling with the digital system gives cubicle-rats back at corporate headquarters something to do.
I am beginning to fantasize about replacing the income tax with a digital button tax. Or call it a click tax. The more steps they use, the more information they want, the more tax they have to pay.
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