LIKE me, you've probably resisted using them too, instead choosing to queue past those little snaking corridors of merchandise at WH Smith (One Direction face masks, Game of Thrones Top Trumps, Justin Bieber drugs-) so that you can use a real, "human" till, rather than subject yourself to the indignity of that voice repeating again and again: "Unidentified item in bagging area".
"No! There's nothing in the bagging area! Look, I'm carrying the paper! I haven't even put it down." "Unidentified item in the bagging area." "Oh for God's sake! Why won't you LISTEN to me? I just want to pay and leave!" "Unidentified item in the bagging area."
Funny to think that someone had to write this line – perhaps some poor, frustrated novelist with dreams of winning the Booker, but who has so far only managed to achieve this. Still, it's publication of a sort.
These automatic, talking tills are taking over. Every time you go into a Smiths or a supermarket, a few more seem to have appeared. EM Forster called his famous story of the future The Machine Stops, but these ones don't.
These inquisitorial beasts ask so many questions ("Have you brought your own bag?" and so on), and make the process of paying so confusing (you could work it out, but you're tired, you don't want to deal with a mass of unnecessary questions), that it is easy to get confused. Which means you end up pressing the wrong part of the screen, or not pressing it all, or trying to short cut the process and before you know it, the wretched thing is saying "Suspect individual ignoring bagging area question"' and a member of staff has to come over. Which is ludicrous too, because these machines have been brought in to cut staff numbers.
The companies will never admit this, of course. Customer first, blah blah blah. Worse, sometimes this member of staff is new and is a little uncertain what to do (because you've got one of the store's little discount cards) and so they have to call someone else over and, before you know it, there's a line of staff stretching to the back of the shop, like Russian dolls.
But if each talking till has to have its own shop-floor avatar, that's fine. It's the human interaction we all crave, after all, and as conversation goes "unidentified item in bagging area" is a bit of a non-starter.
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