Show Me the... Change

I have a peeve. It's not a life-affecting peeve, but like all peeves, it gets under my skin every time it happens, churning the wheels in my brain to think about how I want to fix this, until 1 minute later, I am out the door and the moment passes. At any store, grocery or otherwise, there are two ways the cashier can hand you the change: first the coins then the bills, or the coins piled on top of the bills. The former -first the coins in the palm of your hand then the bills into your fingertips- makes sense to the customer, though it requires two steps for the cashier. To the customer, who is juggling bags, wallets, and trying to grab the purchases to move swiftly out of the way of the next customer, this is the most efficient. It allows you to drop the bills into your bag, pocket, wallet and not drop the coins all over the ground.

The latter approach makes no sense to me, whatsoever, and is completely inefficient and unhelpful to the customer. I personally don't even get it from the cashier point of view, but that it looks tidy. To fold the bills long ways, delicately to hold a pile of loose change, and pass it steadily over to the customer seems like it should be an act in the circus. You can even see the look on the cashier's face as they push their hand (an act of one hand) forward, nervously, and let out a small, silent sigh of relief once it has changed hands and now is the responsibility and under the care of the customer. The act can be likened to the game of passing the orange from chin to chin. Once you've passed it, if it gets dropped, wasn't on your watch!!!

I will admit that other people may be more coordinated than this author, but 5 out of 10 times, in trying to grab it all, coins fall all over the place- on the floor, in my bag, in my purchases -and my hands are twisted in wildly artistic ways trying to catch them, take hold of the bills, juggle my bags and step aside for the next customer. Yes, I look like a clutz, and the cashier just stands there looking dumb-founded at how much of an idiot their customer could be! Isn't that just peachy, my eyes implore. You figured it would be a nice, neat package to hand me bills with a mountain of loose coins and I look like the idiot. Next time, don't do me any favors. Take the extra minute to hand me the coins first, then the bills. I'll smile and be on my way.

Tech Heck

Does anyone else get beyond frustrated with technology? Does anyone else think that it is completely ironic that a basic user of tech tools should be able to do something basic, like posting a comment to a forum or uploading something. And yet, how many times has something that should take "just 5 minutes" turned into an hour's project, riddled with profanities, foot-stomping, and key-pounding? Isn't this basic functionality that you are trying to complete part of the program's CORE competency?

Well, look. I remember working way back when in the day withOUT the computer - ha! Can you imagine. Then, one day our department of 25 people received 2 computers. Yay! We were ecstatic because they also came hooked in with 2 dot-matrix printers. Talk about s - l - o - o - o - o - w! Then, came the fax machine, with rolly fax paper, then came email, then came cell phones (the big clunkers), then came an AT&T calling card to use overseas. Then came a computer on every desk, the internet, dot.coms, real paper for the fax machine. Log-on time went from 5 minutes down to 1 minute. Where did I go? I grew impatient. The faster things worked, the more I increased my demands on them. It's not fair, but that's life, isn't it? The better you work at something, the more you are tapped for other similar situations. So, we place greater and greater demands on our technology to work faster, easier, problem-free, glitch-free, hassle-free. But that just isn't practical...

Lower our expectations? Not necessarily. With consumer expectations comes the innovation. But, we should strengthen our resolve. Andrea Lee in the ezine article, "Overcoming Frustration with Technology" counsels us to take a step back from time to time. Next time, the universal remote is not clicking through the search functionality quick enough, remember the days when a television set came with 3 channels, a dial and rabbit ears that needed to point in different directions for each channel.