License to be ill

People are idiots. Well, not those of you who are smart enough to be reading this, and probably not some of those NASA guys, but a whole lot of the rest of humanity could write the book, Idiot's Guide to Being an Idiot. If they could write, that is.

That said, I believe it is the duty of the few of us reading this to begin to license certain activities. We'll call our effort the Balanced Life License Commission, because that sounds like the kind of thing that would gets lots of government funding from a Democratic congress. We will create tests that humanity will have to pass in order to engage in certain of life's possibilities. While there are many things that should probably require passing a test in order to do, such as have kids, get a credit card, and buy a remote control with more than 5 buttons on it, our first new license will be issued in the realm of self serve lines in retail/grocery stores.

I like self serve lines. I don't have to engage in any sort of fake banter with the cashier, I don't have to wait while they spend 3 minutes exchanging two rolls of nickels and two rolls of pennies for a five dollar bill (which they double count), and I don't have to wonder how clean the hands are of the person loading my watermelon into my cart (with my own hands, I KNOW how dirty they are).

Now, I have used lots and lots of self-serve lines. They all work pretty much the same way. If the store has some sort of "bonus card," you scan that first, then you scan your items, you place them in bags, you choose your payment method, you pay, you gather your receipt and you get on with your life. This is how it goes 99.9% of the time for me. On the rare occasion I have an issue, it is always because the machine ran out of register tape, or something scanned but was unrecognized. It would seem others could perform these same tasks with the same relative success rate I enjoy. Not so.

Here is an actual story from the grocery store that I personally witnessed over the weekend. A couple had about 15 things in their basket, so I chose their line. After all, they only had fifteen things, and there were TWO of them, so the odds of one of them possessing sufficient gray matter to successfully navigate the complexities of a machine designed to be understandable by a third grader seemed pretty high. Alas, it was not to be. They started by trying to swipe their "bonus card" on the credit card machine. Three times. I stepped in and let them know they needed to scan the bar code and kind of demonstrated what I meant. They got it and started scanning their groceries. All went well until they got to their fruit. Since they had bagged this themselves, they didn't know what to scan. Since I had wised up by then, I pointed to the "produce" key and suggested they press that. They did it and then seemed to be completely flummoxed by the visual they saw, which was two buttons. One said Fruit and had a picture of an apple. The other said vegetable and had a picture of an ear of corn. Since they didn't see a picture of the oranges they had, they were stymied. But, they did finally read the words and pressed the apple. Now they had two choices. They could punch in the item number for their oranges, which was on a little sticker right on the orange, or they could page through the visuals of the fruits, looking for oranges. They chose to page through. When I noticed they also had some bulk candy in their basket, I moved to another line.

As bad as that was, Walmart was even worse. If there was ever a store that should not have self-serve lines, it's Walmart. I buy cleaning supplies at Walmart because my wife is OCD, and I like to spend money on things other than cleaning supplies occasionally, so I buy them where they are cheapest. I also buy them in large quantities for the reason mentioned previously. So, I'm holding one of those monster-sized laundry detergents, some dryer sheets, some Lysol Floor cleaner and a bag of cookies (while not technically a cleaning supply, cookies are also a frequent Walmart purchase). There are two people in front of me in line. The other lines are all very long, so I am felling pretty happy with my choice of lines. The person at the front of the line made the grocery store people look like the founders of MENSA. She apparently had no idea that a connection existed between the UPC code and the scanner. She turned every item around and around and moved it all over the scanner. She seemed quite delighted when something actually rung up 'like magic." Anyway, several agonizing minutes later she does manage to pay with cash and go on her merry way. The guy in front of me steps up to the plate. To my mind, he looks like a regular guy, which I define as someone who looks like someone I would potentially go have a beer with. This classification as "regular guy," or RG, comes with an accompanying assumption of intelligence. I don't assume he is an Einstein, but I do assume he knows that Einstein is not just some guy who sells bagels with his brother. Bad assumption. First off, this guy seems to believe that he has to unload everything from his cart onto the the roughly 2X2 space next to the scanner. The creates several "Laurel and Hardy go to Hell" moments as he tries to stack everything from his cart onto one small space.

Many, many moments later, after the mostly-asleep attendant has helped him three times, he finally goes to pay with: A Traveler's check.

License Revoked.