“Cash or card only”; There are at least ten self-check outs at the front of the store… ( If you want to do the store’s job for them.) No waiting! Otherwise, get in line at the only register open ( seven others being closed) with a human being and wait! Do you need change, (other than a pocket full of nickles, dimes and quarters), have coupons, God forbid–write a check, perform services that you’re supposed to get from the cashier? Wait in the one open line. Otherwise, use your credit card—touch it to the “thingy” and you’re done. Or wait in line, whither up and die, we don’t really care! It’s our way or the highway. More and more I find myself taking the highway next time to a place that does things the old way, even if it costs just a little bit more. Do they care? I doubt it.
“What do you old people do”, this twenty-something year old asks me while in line at Bigmart? “Do you guys carry cash around? Do you go to ATMs every day to get a new supply? You are all so degenerate! Nobody does this anymore. We have modern things now like plastic cards and smart phones. You just touch ‘em to the kiosk electronic thingy and go on your way! You’re holding up the line writing that check. That’s so old school. The cashier doesn’t want to have to deal with it; you’re making us all have to wait. She’s gotta punch in additional buttons and then you’ve gotta sign that electric screen thingy.”
Have you heard or experienced any of this lately when you go out to the store? Have you yet encountered the fellow at the check out who can’t make change? Are we that hard up a society where we are now hiring anybody just because we need a body there? Unfortunately it is usually obvious that these people are products of our educational system. What is really going on in our schools these days? Apparently not reading, writing, and arithmetic!! A robot could do better. And yet there apparently aren’t nearly enough people to fill all the help wanted signs. In fact, if we are to believe what we hear from our college educators this is exactly where our society is headed.
Computers are now doing all the writing and thinking for the students. And it is damned difficult to tell the difference between computer generated papers and brain generated logic. No effort is needed at all by the student. Of course the students are barely getting by in class, when they actually do go, and lack motivation to study their fields. Just google it! Actual study and experiential learning leads to understanding and the formulation of hypotheses. Are we now becoming a computer generated society where the computers substitute for our brains while our actual reasoning ability has become nil because our brains are mush? You’ve just printed out paper “A” and now paper “B”. But you have no understanding of how the two might interact, fit together, because you have no experiential learning. Go ahead, ask some of the professors who are teaching intro and lower level classes at, say Akron U or other colleges.
I’ve just spent several days helping to work on a 1928 Model “A” Ford, a car that we picked up by accident, and, on a whim, bought. We knew absolutely nothing about this car, only that it looked good from the outside, it rolled, and the price was right. Of course, somebody from the club quickly learned of it and insisted on buying it when we get it running, making us an offer that we couldn’t refuse. Well, it didn’t take Jerry Siracki, my cohort, and I long to do just that. Two days and it’s running down the road. We now know everything that is wrong with it, what needs major repair. There are plenty of things to do to bring it up to mechanical soundness.
I bring this up because everything we know about Model “A” came from learning by doing—studying these cars if you will. A computer did not think this through for us. We did it from learning from experience, taking a little bit of information we observed and making hypotheses about what is causing or related to this, then transferring it to the larger picture. For example, the engine is locked up, starter won’t move at all. Oh, the gas is pouring out the carburetor; we’ve got no spark but the cooling system is holding water. From these facts, observations, we could quickly deduce what some of the problems are related to because we know that the arm bone is connected to the shoulder bone, the shoulder bone… etc. We didn’t touch our smart phone to it. The car seat didn’t vibrate us into ecstasy. We only have dumb phones–flip phones anyway—the kind you take and make calls from, nothing else. The old way is much more comfortable. It is predictable and it works. The car now runs and it stops. We can fix exactly what’s wrong.
Maybe I am old school. I use a dumb phone. I still write checks and my bank assures me that they will not go out of style in my lifetime. I concede that there are times and instances when I have no choice but to use the credit card but they have not supplanted my old ways of thinking. I use them sparingly. The stores that won’t take checks or make it hard for me to use them, I go elsewhere and increasingly find myself doing just that. This is how I learned things, and this is what works. Am I old and stupid? Yep. Maybe ignorance is bliss.
