Phonaholics Anonymous

When I leave the house I take my diary and my iPhone. I usually carry my wallet too but that's less important. These days I rarely use cash for anything other than gratuities and I keep £ coins in my coat pocket for that purpose. 

Yesterday morning was perfect gardening weather but I had to make a quick visit to town to the medical practice, to The Woodlands to collect something from one friend for another friend, and for a few groceries.

I did my shop and went to the till and put my few things through and into my bag. It was at this point that I realised that I forgot my phone and therefore my store and payment app. Fortunately I had my wallet in my pocket.

I had to resort to my credit cards in my wallet. However neither had been used for the supermarket before so needed the PIN number. I use them so infrequently I had no idea what they were. I needed my phone for that! Fortunately my debit card worked. 

I spent the rest of the day realising just how dependent I have become on my 'phone. What has really frightened me, though, is the fact that my brain couldn't see past the absence of the phone. I had sufficient actual cash in my wallet and pocket but it actually never occurred to me to check. (Since I wrote that I have realised that the self-service checkouts have no provision for cash).

I am off to join Phonaholics Anonymous. 

On the way home the cherry blossom calmed me down:

On A Visit To The Supermarket

To serve, or not to serve, that is the question:
Whether 'tis easier on the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous waits,
Or to take one's self to the sea of troubles
That is the self-checkouts. To wait - to fume,
No more; and by betrayal of the check-out staff
The heart-ache and the thousand natural redundancies
That time does come when we, Consumer, shall do the work
For free and Business shall rejoice and profit more.

With apologies to The Bard.

I confess that when I have a few items and there are queues at the checkouts at either of our supermarkets (The Coop and Tesco) I will use the self-checkouts. 

However, Tesco is about to get rid of almost all it's serviced checkouts. I can just imagine the chaos that will ensue as many people try to adapt to putting a huge basket of a week's shopping through the self service till and pack it into their bags. Apart from that this is a small community. The checkout is a sociable place as well as a place of commerce. Tesco's plans may or may not go smoothly but with no realistic competition so far as price goes Tesco will have it their way like it or not. The customer is only a cash supplier: a feeder of profits. 

And when they ask to go through my shopping and check that I did it correctly what will I say? I will respond "No. You may not. If you insist that I do your work then you will trust me. After all you have probably seen every move I've made and every thing I have bought on your CCTV. "

Algorithms

The problem is that you can't have a discussion with an algorithm. You can't tell it that it doesn't fit your case. Well, that's not strictly true, however if it doesn't fit the algorithm then it will be ignored or spat back at you.

Amazon recently made a rare (in my experience) error. I ordered Bootledrops quantity 150 Price £12. They arrived 18 hours later. Correct product but quantity 50 (usual price £6.20). Presumably either someone had misread a bar code or something had been miscoded.

If this was a human interaction situation one would, for example,  go into the shop, explain that they had given me the correct product but the wrong package size. It would be swapped. One would leave satisfied.

Obviously in this case I would have to return them to Amazon and ask for the correct quantity. However having got as far as the return algorithm the only thing the algorithm would allow me to do in this particular case was 're-order the exact same product' (the assumption being presumably that it was damaged or faulty which didn't fit) or order another product. 

As it so happens in the 24 hours since the transaction only the 150 size was on sale on the Amazon site.

So I filled in the return form and received the appropriate QR code on the email response. 

This morning I went to the dentist. I had an X-Ray during which I had a chat with the dental practitioner who used to be a teenage best buddy of our late son, Andy. That was totally irrelevant but, wotthehellarchiewotthehell. I then went into the post office, gave the lady at the counter the package and showed the QR code.

I arrived home shortly afterwards and received an email saying [actually it wasn't saying anything but it was telling me something] that Amazon had received the item and refunded my Amazon account.  

They had.

Then I ordered the items I wanted direct from the company selling them. 

Supermarket Checkouts

Recently someone in my Blogland mentioned or blogged about supermarket payment systems comparing manned and self-service tills. I think it may have arisen because of the superfast manned tills at Lidl and Aldi. I cannot recall which the person preferred but he/she was very adamant about it.

So far as supermarkets are concerned it all boils down to money. Fewer people = less cost = more profit potential. Lidl and Aldi have limited employment down to a fine art together with easily scanned bar codes and staff who work their socks off. 

So far as we, as customers, are concerned a lot is personal preference. Going through a manned checkout is rarely fast. An aside - a wonderful irony used to be that one of the fastest checkout staff in our Coop was also one of the most sociable. People would join her queue just for the craic (Gaelic - enjoyable social activity). Sometimes other staff would be free. However, if you are in a hurry with a few items self-service is invariably the fastest way out of the shop.

So far as society is concerned our Coop (which I believe is the largest in Scotland) employs a lot of staff and is an important employer. The more self-service checkouts the fewer people employed.

Amazon has gone one further with a trial shop, in London I think, which has no payment facilities at all. You register your phone when you go in and as you put something in your shopping bag it is automatically charged to your card.

Of course the fewer the staff and the greater the automation the less attention can be given to 'confused' people (usually elderly) or the disabled who need help. 

I do not look forward to a day of complete automation, I'll pay the price and help employment. Am I alone?

Catching Up

We've had some good weather. Well, when I say 'good' what I mean is that it wasn't raining and the wind was absent or a tolerable whisper instead of the usual eye-watering gale. In fact on a couple of days we had sun as well. So I've spent a couple of weeks in the garden. I've cut down bushes and spent hours removing the roots to make way for a wild flower bed. I trialled one last year and got lots of pleasure from the colour and the increased bee and insect population.

Many of the plants in the garden are Alpines and they are not in suitable conditions so I've dug out an area and am making a rockery of sorts with a more suitable growing medium.

I have also been moving lots of tubs of daffodils and tulips as well as humping 100litre bags of garden compost etc around.

One thing all this has taught me is that I'm not as young as I was this time last year. Then I could actually pick up 100l bag of compost and put it in the wheelbarrow. This year I struggled. So now I'm planning the garden on the basis that there will come a time (if it hasn't already come) when I have to ensure that things are done in such a way that it minimises lifting large, heavy things.

At 0500 yesterday morning my body sprung (well as springy as my body does anything these days) into action and I set off to be on board MV Loch Seaforth for the exciting journey to Ullapool from whence I would drive to Glasgow for my 16-weekly three days of scans and my drugs trial review.

The main arterial road through the Scottish Highlands from Inverness to Perth and thence towards Glasgow is the A9. As you can imagine it is a very busy road carrying most of the freight to and from the North of Scotland.  However most of it is still 2 lane with occasional 4 lane dual carriageway. I have been travelling up and down it for nearly half a century. I think that I can safely say that I have never seen it as quiet as it was yesterday. It is a road controlled by average speed cameras so people rarely speed on it. Heavy goods vehicles, however, have a speed limit 10 miles an hour less than cars and one often gets stuck behind them until the next dual carriageway or overtaking lane. Not so yesterday.  

There are no toilet facilities open anywhere in Scotland so I made no 'comfort stops' either.

As a result I was in Bishopbriggs in a record time of about 4¼ hours after leaving the ferry in Ullapool.

Today has been shopping day for all the messages I've been asked to get for people marooned on the Island plus, I have to say, some odds and ends for myself.

The next few days will be spent having scans and my drugs trial review. Hopefully. I'll be home on Thursday evening.