MACHINES – ENOUGH TO DRIVE YOU BERSERK

I forget how many years ago it was but I can still recall the incident quite clearly. I was in the Taunton branch of Argos and having perused their catalogue and found what it was I wanted to buy, I wrote the products numerical code on a flimsy bit of paper with one of those tiny pens Argos have that are so obviously designed with their pinchability in mind. I then started to make my way to the payment point but was stopped by a young lady who asked if I’d like to try to use a new machine that they’d installed by which I could pay without having to queue for the tills. I remember saying to her that it seemed to me that she was being employed to do herself out of a job and I wondered what she thought about that. She just smiled and proceeded to talk me through the process of tapping my purchase details into the machine and paying by card.

This week I was back in the same store. I was there looking for skewers. I tapped my request into an electronic device and learnt that they didn’t have any. This was not a huge concern to me, but what did bother me was that the shop was as soulless as it was skewerless. As far as I could see the large open space had just the one person in it. He was pacing around like a bored caged animal, employed by an otherwise faceless corporation on the off chance that someone would need some assistance with one of the several machines that meant that tills were now no longer deemed necessary at all.

But it wasn’t just Argos. Earlier I’d visited one of the banks in Taunton. I would of course have preferred to have popped into one in my home town of Wellington but, like all but one of the major banks there, this has closed down because, it’s said, nobody needs to visit a bank these days. And so I joined a long line of people who hadn’t got that particular memo, each of us waiting our turn to be shown how to complete whatever transaction it was that we wanted to make on yet another machine.

But my reason for entering this once fine financial institution was, I thought, one that a machine wouldn’t be able to help me with and so I caught the eye of one of the skeleton staff who were there to attend to the bemused, and explained that I wanted to open a new account. I was asked to take a seat and for a moment I thought I would soon be interacting with a real person. Which I was of sorts but only to the extent of being told I could open a new account on the internet. And so I resignedly had to pull my phone from my pocket and, under her watchful eye, did what I was clearly expected to have done at home.

On this occasion, the process was admittedly straightforward – but frequently it isn’t. Such was my experience the previous week in the Post Office. Wellington is a sizeable town which as well as being almost bankless has, for some time, been without its own post office, the townsfolk having had to rely on the sterling efforts of a small branch in a convenience store in neighbouring Rockwell Green. Taunton, the county town of Somerset, appears to be heading in a similar direction as it has also lost its dedicated post office with what now passes as the post office being squeezed into a branch of W.H.Smiths. It is, and I use the word loosely, ‘served’ largely by machines. Machines which, on the day I was there, weren’t working and even when they were, were proving largely incomprehensible to the queue of increasing frustrated customers.

But irrespective of the efficiency or otherwise of all these machines, something very important is being lost as they become increasingly ubiquitous. Whilst they may save the companies who employ them some money, we who have to use them are paying a high price. Because it’s not only jobs that are being lost.

Partly as a result of an over reliance on technology and other artificial forms of communication, we are losing the opportunity to interact with one another and are being forced to live increasingly isolated lives. Thus we are currently living through an epidemic of loneliness in which 7.1% of the U.K. population are experiencing chronic loneliness, meaning they feel lonely ‘often or always’, a figure which is even higher amongst younger people. Given that loneliness is as bad for one’s health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, perhaps we should be as concerned to do something about it as we are about our young people smoking.

In a world where the onus is on being authentic, it is odd that we have become so dependent on such artificial forms of interaction. And having lost the art of conversation, it is little wonder that we now seem increasingly unable to live at peace with one another. Because if we can’t talk to those we live alongside, how can we expect to talk to and understand those further afield. with whom we are prone to disagree? The answer is that we won’t. Rather we will inevitably become more isolated from and suspicious of such folk and ultimately run the risk of learning only how to hate them.

And just now I think we all know how that ends.

The last store I visited was Waterstones. And without a self checkout in site, what a contrast it was. I was one of numerous people who, as we browsed the bookseller’s shelves, enjoyed the accompanying sound of the conversation taking place between customers and knowledgable staff regarding all manner of subjects literary. When I enquired about the availability of one particular book – ‘Burglar Bill’ by Janet and Allan Ahlberg since you ask – no doubt one of thousands that the store sold, the friendly chap behind the counter knew immediately the title I was referring to and was able to help me in my search.

In the end though I bought Ade Edmondson’s new autobiography, ‘Berserker!’. He writes extremely well and in a conversational style and I for one am enjoying getting to know a bit more about him. His book is, of course, a far more reliable source than Wikipedia which, he recounts, contains many false statements, statements which he was, nonetheless, prevented from correcting because the ‘go to’ source of information for so many of us didn’t consider him a reliable witness about his own life!

And so we really do have to try and cease being so reliant on technology and learn once again how to interact with one another. We need to spend time with each other and take that time to talk. Not everything has to be done in a rush and there really is a place for doing things slowly.

Because all the best things in life take time, and living isolated lives is not a remotely good idea.

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Related blogs:

To read ‘Contactless’ click here

To read ‘On not remotely caring’, click here

To read ‘Eleanor Rigby is not at all fine’, click here

To read ‘Life in the slow lane’, click here

To read ‘A Sorrow Shared’, click here

To read ‘Professor Ian Aird – a time to die?’, click here

To read ‘When Rain Stops Play’, click here