Episode 77: Tip for Panera

Panera is one of my favorite places to eat, mostly because I don't ever feel sick after eating there. They used to play classical music too, which made me feel mature and sophisticated, as opposed to all those other places with TVs everywhere and pop music blaring. In any case, I even used to like talking to the people who worked at my favorite Panera, which is a big step for me. I don't even like talking to people I know. Everything was going so well for a while. I felt like Panera was really helping me develop my social interaction skills.

That all changed when someone at Panera decided it would be a good idea to add a question to every credit card transaction. "Would you like to add a tip?"

Wait, what?!

Don't we usually add tips after service has been rendered? How can you ask me to leave a tip before I know how good the service will be? What if I leave a tip and I get terrible service? What if I don't leave a tip and I get exceptional service?

Isn't this actually more like extortion?

Hmm, just a second...Siri, what does extortion mean?

...

Yep, it's just like that. It is just like a shakedown. Do you want good service or bad service? Do you want us to get your order right, or screw it all up? Oh, we'll take good care of you, for a price.

I panic and just hit NO if I ever actually have to order at the counter, because hitting YES leads to a math question, and I'm terrible at math. Thankfully my favorite Panera also has kiosks where I can order without ever having to talk to anyone, so I can avoid the whole awkward exchange. This has set my social interaction development way back. Why, Panera, why?

Here's a tip for you, Panera. Rather than asking us to tip before we get our food, why don't you just raise the prices and pay your employees a bit more? Why don't you tip your employees? Or just keep asking that awkward question so everyone feels uncomfortable at the end of every transaction.

Episode 76: Things I Don't Understand

There are lots of things I just don't understand. In fact, the longer I live, the more things I don't understand. As I was putting a CD on iTunes the other day I came across a hidden track. (Don't get distracted by the fact that I am still putting CDs on iTunes. It's still a thing.) What the heck was the point of hiding a track on a CD? Don't you want people to hear your music? Why would you make someone listen to 10 minutes of dead air before getting to a hidden song? It's a moot point now, what with CDs going extinct, but I still don't get it.

Social media is full of mystery to me. It's not that I don't understand how it all works, that's the simple part. You have something to say or to show so you post it for all the world to see. The part I don't understand is what people choose to post. Sometimes people post private (at least they seem private to me) heart-felt messages to family members or friends. That's a little like writing love letters on billboards instead of leaving them on your lover's pillow, which makes me feel a little uncomfortable, like I accidentally found a letter that should have been left on someone's pillow. Those letters are fine to share when some intrepid youngster finds them in an attic 100 years from now, when we're all dead. It's just awkward now, when we're all alive.

I don't understand warning labels, or really I suppose I don't understand how people could possibly need some of the warning labels I see. I bought a windshield sun shade, the folding silver kind that you put in your windshield to keep the sun from melting the inside of your car. It had a warning not to use it while driving. Really? Someone has tried that? I hope they at least cut eye holes in it.

Man wipes. I don't even know what to say. Wet wipes or antibacterial wipes are not specific enough, or are too feminine? On the one hand there is an increasing trend toward removing all reference to gender because people are increasingly offended by gender-specific language. On the other hand, we also now have man wipes. 

It's all so very confusing. People are confusing. 

Episode 73: Trash Collection and the End of Humanity

I am a big fan of trash collectors, not the people who go through other people’s trash and collect stuff, but the people who come to my house early in the morning and take away all the stuff I throw away.  The other people are quite often hoarders, which is bad for the business of real trash collectors.  That is probably why real trash collectors have started moving away from trash collecting and towards waste management.  They do not want to be confused with people who actually collect and keep trash.  In any case, as much as I like trash collectors, I do believe they very well could be pushing humanity towards its demise.  

You see, knowing someone is going to pick up everything we throw away is making most of us less responsible and less thoughtful, which is good for people in the manufacturing business, the advertising business, the retail business, and all sorts of other business, but not as good for the actual business of living on a planet with other living things also trying to live on said planet. 

Trash collectors are really enabling bad behavior. 

As long as they keep coming to pick up trash, we will become increasingly irresponsible with what we throw away.  It is only a matter of time before we just skip using stuff and start throwing it away on the way out of the stores in which we buy the stuff.  (Judging by the quality of a large portion of manufactured goods today, the manufacturers are already operating with that assumption.)  Fewer and fewer things are made to last, because there is no money in making things that do not have to be replaced every 12.7 seconds.

What would happen if trash collectors stopped collecting our trash?  What if we had to figure out what to do with all our trash?  I bet we wouldn’t buy as many things.  Most of the things we buy end up in the trash not long after we buy them, because we know the trash collectors will just come get them, the manufacturers will just make more, the advertisers will tell us about all the new things the manufacturers are making, and the retailers will happily sell them to us.  

It is a bit like the hydrological cycle, except with stuff we don’t need, and it is less like a cycle and more like a slow straight line to a future in which we live on the skin of a gigantic whirling ball of waste.  At that point, we would probably abandon Earth so we wouldn't have to deal with the waste problem.

When we decide the solution to a problem is to make it someone else's problem, that's when we embrace the end of humanity.  

Episode 72: Targeted Marketing

Advertisers are some of my favorite people, or at least they might be, if they weren't some of my least favorite people.  Actually, I am not sure about them as people, in fact, I am not even sure they are people.  In an age of bots and algorithms and such, advertisers are quickly becoming as faceless as they have always been soulless.

I bring all this up because the latest bothersome intrusion into my otherwise peaceful existence has been coming from the nether regions of the windowless basement dwellings of commercial marketing strategists straight to my computer as I wander aimlessly through the increasingly irrelevant expanse of social media.

Targeted marketing has taken on a whole new dimension now that the basement dwellers can actually use all the data they collect.  They have been collecting all sorts of data about us and our preferences for eons, but now they can actually use that data to make relevant ads pop up on our computer screens as we waste our time checking up on everyone else’s lives, while our own lives flitter on by.

I am all for these ads, because it reminds me that someone is always watching and waiting to sneak up and shove a relevant ad in my face.  It makes me think twice before I browse unsavory or embarrassing content, which is probably a good thing.  No one wants relevant ads popping up when what is relevant is also rather embarrassing and revealing.  Wait, I’m not actually all for these ads.  Part of me is pretty creeped out. 

Another part of me does rather like it when those ads tell me the things for which I have been searching are on sale somewhere.  After all, isn’t the complete infiltration of my virtual mind a small price to pay when it comes to saving some cash?  It’s not like the people responsible for the people responsible for the ads are trying to control me, right? I’m much too smart for…What the?  Snuggies on clearance!  That’s just what I’ve been looking for!  Sorry, but I can’t miss out on that.