Press My Hot Buttons

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First there was barter. You manually hauled your stuff to meet with someone who'd hauled their stuff to the meeting spot. Cumbersome system this barter thing was. Hard on the back too. Even harder when the barter was interrupted by brigands who'd just swooped in and scooped up everything that you and everyone else had come to barter. Barter's User Friendly Rating: 2.

Next came money. It was common currency - everyone in the same country used the same money. Supermarket checkout - no problem. User Friendly Rating: 10.

Then came checks. Same as money, except you have to write this money yourself. At the supermarket you could pay by check, but only if you’d first trooped to the Discourtesy Desk and filled out forms, jumped through a bureaucratic hoop or two, to get a Store Card which entitled you to pay by check at checkout. Unfortunately...stores did not disallow pay-by-check in the Express Lane. Thus nullifying the meaning of the word "Express" - and too often turning that lane into Gridlock Alley. Checks' User Friendly Rating: 4.

Consumer Convenience History was next made by grocers’ introduction of the Universal Product Code bar code (UPC), which sped checkout like substance abuse grease sped countless crappy actors down the Jan Michael Vincent-Gary Busey Career Slide Into Oblivion. Way to go, UPC! User Friendly Rating: 10.

Now we have Debit Cards. Wonderful invention they are, too, because when in possession of a Debit Card, backed by a positive balance in the bank account to which you’d linked your Debit Card, you feel relieved of having to carry loads of cash all over the place, thus mugger-proofing your money. However several glitches with Debit Cards emerged.

First, in the checkout lane there’s the customer in front of you who apparently created a unique PIN for each card in the assortment of plastic cards that she possesses: credit cards (x 4); debit cards (x ??); Best Buy card; Breast Cancer Donor Platinum Card; NORML Gold Visa; Veterans Of Foreign Time-Share Weekends Card; the It'sForTheChildrenUNICEF Silver card; Frequent Preferred Log Jam Card; and more such what have you.

So you stand there, your ice cream bricks melting on the rubber checkout belt all over your bag of thawing jumbo shrimp, while Miss Cards Of A Thousand PINs at the Debit Card Keypad does her best impression of genius codebreaker Alan Turing as she tries keying, one after another, every possible four-digit combination until she finally lucky-guesses the one that triggers TRANSCATION APPROVED. Two nights later when you go to spoon ice cream from your home freezer-refrozen ice cream brick you discover that its peripheral contents have turned into something resembling fossilized mastodon tissue - and, just your luck, Ron Popeil has yet to invent the Kitchen Jackhammer. Then your next evening’s supper tastes funny - I don’t know much about Darwin, but are shrimp supposed to have angora-like pulpy-fuzzy coats?

　

Second, for you to use your Debit Card each store has its unique adventure-packed Unfamiliar Customer-Interface Check-Out Keypad - known by the industry insiders' acronym UC-IC-OK.

Unlike the wonderfully standardized UPC-barcoded product packages which scan on every supermarket’s and retailer’s scanner ever invented, each store’s UC-IC-OK keypad is uniquely configured to bewilder customers and slow the hell out of the checkout lane: function buttons in different places; different buttons on each keypad; differently colored buttons on each one; different DO YOU WANT CASH BACK? arrangements and “standard” amounts; and so on and so forth (as they say on all those New York Cop shows). And, just to make things evermore jolly and Customer-Convenient, each UC-IC-OK keypad has a different, store-unique keying-and-customer-approval procedure - just to keep us Information Age-Fluent consumers high up in the Computer Literacy Anti-Migraine Census.

But some of these UC-IC-OK keypads so cunningly hide the CLEAR and the BACKSPACE buttons that, as you stand there at the keypad with nine customers in line behind you, you think you’re on TV with Howie Mandel, under enormous pressure to pick’n’press the right button before the customers behind you in the checkout line start making tempting Banker Offers to buy you the hell out of their way before their ice cream bricks melt and their thawing shrimp grow their fuzzy-pulpy Darwin angora-coats. But then the bewildering assortment of store-unique UC-IC-OK devices are, after all, just one more Modern Convenience manifestation of the Information Age’s innumerable inventive examples of The Great Leap Sideways.

There’s another NFL-Time-Out-seven-commercial-long hold-up with the IC-UC-OK checkout keypads. Some people - narcissists, sadists, misanthropes, perverts - use the keypad-swiper to swipe not their Debit Card, but one or more of their credit cards. This is a whole new ball game. Because - here you go again - each store’s unique IC-UC-OK keypad has, of course, a unique procedure for credit card transactions. The endless assortment of Special Education learning curves for each store’s different IC-UC-OK keypads are time-gobbling bad enough for Debit Card transactions. But their learning curve for credit card customers can only be surmounted if you’re lucky that the credit card customer in front of you has prepared for this Close Encounter with this store’s unique IC-UC-OK keypad by her having taken the precaution to have earned a Higher Mathematics magna cum laude diploma, with a minor in Sumerian petroglyphs, from MIT.

So, UC-IC-OK keypads’ User Friendly Rating: Oh, wait, we’re not there yet because...　

Each unique IC-UC-OK keypad has - of course! a unique LCD display screen. Many of these are the wishfully-named "touch"-screens. Unfortunately the Government Mandated Customer Abuse Testing Protocol for touch-screen devices seems to have omitted actual customer testers. Which means that the little touch-digit-squares on the millions of assorted touch-screens that have been customer-abused for more than ten thousand transactions each don’t activate when you touch them with that Special Inkless Touch-Screen Stylus-Wand that’s tethered to the UC-IC-OK keypad.

If, that is, one of those Wands - or Magic Styluses, or Styl-O-Wands - or whatever the hell they’re called - is actually still tethered to the IC-UC-OK keypad.

And - you saw this one coming, didn’t you? - even when you find a Styl-O-Wand tethered to the keypad, it’s tether is made of the most incorrigible, most vexing Self-Tangling-Self-Knotting Plast-O-Cord™ ever invented. So that from your life-span you now deduct the half-life of the Uranium 235 atom, because that's how long it takes for you to disentangle the frikking Plast-O-Cord so you can, you know, wield the Wand the way the Wand was - supposedly - designed to have been wielded. Quite involuntarily you find yourself thinking, “Good thing Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother’s wand wasn’t made by the forward-thinking designers and wand-tether-purchasing-agents over at Self-Tangling Plast-O-Cord™ Corporation.”

So you give up on the Wand and instead you poke the touch-screen digital-squares with your finger (and probably your finger comes away with your brand-new very own perfectly aggressive Swine Flu culture - or with a minute particle of some previous customer’s cart back-seated, touch-to-learn-about-the-world, playful toddler’s booger donor sample). But your finger’s efficiency for this keypad function doesn’t match that of the Styl-O-Wand. So you stand there, fingering-in LCD-flat screen digits in their proper order. But because the touch-screen was not designed for Human Booger-Finger Interface, but instead for Wand-Held-Only Activation (WHOA), the screen doesn’t register one, or several, of the digits from your finger-touches. So...you have to start all over again from LCD Swine Flu-Booger Digit Square One. But only after - yep, you guessed it! - you’ve found the cleverly, mysteriously located CLEAR button.

So let’s see. UC-IC-OK keypad User Friendly Rating: -273 degrees Kelvin.

Except, of course, when it comes to your semi-fossilized ice cream brick and your suddenly sweater-fashion-conscious shrimp.

So now you’re done here at checkout. Right? Oh, no. Wait. Wait. Because before you trundle - or as your already pushing like Sisyphus - your cart from the World’s Greatest Avoidable Unique Digital Keypad Procedure Bottleneck, you have to...Stop. Right. There. Because you can't leave without your having heard and obeyed your checkout clerk's Magic Words:

“Hit ‘OK’."