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Minor Strangeness (IHTM)

catseye said:
It can be an automatic response. Like putting kisses on the end of a text (because you'd previously been messaging your daughter) and then remembering that you were now messaging your doctor...

...not me. No, never.
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Or sending your DH an affectionate text about how you'll pick him up a curry for his tea and does he want one of the red hot ones and I'm not responsible for the consequences and oh dear, all that went one's manager...
 
I thought I had some odd spooky voices floating around the house earlier today!

Brief snatches of what sounded like bits of a conversation, I went up to the back door - maybe someone in my back garden? Nope, door's closed. Was it the radio I have on in the background in the kitchen, quietly pootling away on Classic FM? No, it was a quiet violin piece and not some strange, very loud advert. I got to the living room (I live in a small house!) and the TV had a black screen, off! Then it was on and then off as bad weather was interfering with the digital signal on BBC lunchtime news.

I was hearing odd snatches of a reporter speculating on something very important to someone else in a studio. Mr J had gone out and left the TV on. Although it looked off. Fancier TV tech than we're used to and it seems a bit glitchy at the slightest hint of a breeze or drizzle. It's more like a PC than a TV but you can't actually buy just a 'TV' TV now.
 
Stormkhan said:
Am I crediting the British public with too much?
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"A person is smart, but 'people' are stupid"
I am astonished at just how thick people are in general on pretty much an everyday basis.
Even with the most basic of things sometimes people act as if they're experiencing some new kind of alien technology and they're working out how to use it for the first time.
Even in the supermarket just the other day at the checkout I had loaded my several items on the conveyor belt and the bleep-jockey processed all my items except one - the very obvious 4 pint of milk.
I had placed the items into a bag and looked up expecting the milk to be scanned and handed to me but no, she was just staring at me with a glazed expression on her face.
I directed my gaze at the milk and made towards nodding my head in that direction to draw her attention to it.
Nope. Nothing.
"The milk?" I said.
There was 'a moment' of at least 5 seconds as she slowly turned her head and surveyed the bottle of milk, and then finally the message reached her hands from her brain to pick it up and scan it, all in slow-motion, as if she didn't want me to have my milk.
Beats me.
 
Trevp666 said:
"A person is smart, but 'people' are stupid"
I am astonished at just how thick people are in general on pretty much an everyday basis.
Even with the most basic of things sometimes people act as if they're experiencing some new kind of alien technology and they're working out how to use it for the first time.
Even in the supermarket just the other day at the checkout I had loaded my several items on the conveyor belt and the bleep-jockey processed all my items except one - the very obvious 4 pint of milk.
I had placed the items into a bag and looked up expecting the milk to be scanned and handed to me but no, she was just staring at me with a glazed expression on her face.
I directed my gaze at the milk and made towards nodding my head in that direction to draw her attention to it.
Nope. Nothing.
"The milk?" I said.
There was 'a moment' of at least 5 seconds as she slowly turned her head and surveyed the bottle of milk, and then finally the message reached her hands from her brain to pick it up and scan it, all in slow-motion, as if she didn't want me to have my milk.
Beats me.
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She 'zoned out' for a minute. Probably due to mobile phone withdrawal symptoms.
 
Trevp666 said:
"A person is smart, but 'people' are stupid"
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I can't recall the story, or the exact wording, but I think Terry Pratchett mentioned the concept that a mob has the intelligence of the lowest of it's members.
It's amazing how intelligent folks will 'hand over' control of their actions if surrounded by people who are doing blatantly stupid things.
At school, we used to have fun by one of us standing in a public space, say an open shopping area. Another two would join us and we'd pretend to a conversation, staring pointedly at nothing in the air, sometimes glancing around and pointing up. After a time, we'd count the number of complete strangers, stopping in their tracks, staring up at the sky, trying to see what 'everyone' was looking at.
We'd just leave them to it. The largest crowds would last the longest, and this would gather the fastest with a large number of initial 'conspirators'. Prank? Yup. But also a good 'social experiment'. :D
 
Trevp666 said:
"A person is smart, but 'people' are stupid"
I am astonished at just how thick people are in general on pretty much an everyday basis.
Even with the most basic of things sometimes people act as if they're experiencing some new kind of alien technology and they're working out how to use it for the first time.
Even in the supermarket just the other day at the checkout I had loaded my several items on the conveyor belt and the bleep-jockey processed all my items except one - the very obvious 4 pint of milk.
I had placed the items into a bag and looked up expecting the milk to be scanned and handed to me but no, she was just staring at me with a glazed expression on her face.
I directed my gaze at the milk and made towards nodding my head in that direction to draw her attention to it.
Nope. Nothing.
"The milk?" I said.
There was 'a moment' of at least 5 seconds as she slowly turned her head and surveyed the bottle of milk, and then finally the message reached her hands from her brain to pick it up and scan it, all in slow-motion, as if she didn't want me to have my milk.
Beats me.
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Was she wearing a headset?

We have to wear headsets all the time when on shift. And sometimes, unseen and unheard by the customer, we might be getting told to 'watch out for those two blokes down aisle five, they're lifting alcohol', 'news from another close branch, they've just had an armed hold up, keep your eyes open', or even sometimes just 'Mandy on till seven, what time are you on until? Any chance you can stay until Nigel gets in at twelve?'

It can be really hard to listen to what's going on 'back of house' and still respond to a customer. Sometimes I have to stop what I'm doing and listen - if it's really important stuff - and then what I'm doing might go out of my head and it takes me a couple of moments to reorientate myself into what's in front of me.
 
catseye said:
Was she wearing a headset?
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No.

And on the possibility of a 'seizure' - well, I guess it's possible but it seemed more like she was looking at me in the way that they do when they've scanned all your items and they're waiting for you to finish bagging them before announcing the cost.
(e.g. "That'll be £3, 7, & 6 please".)

I thought that maybe she thought that the 4 pint of milk was a separate item, possibly belonging to the next customer?

No idea. She was a middle-aged woman of some sort of Oriental extraction, possibly Vietnamese (not that that's got anything to do with anything).
 
As an illustration of my 'headset' point - yesterday a man was buying scratchcards. He gave me a list of ones he wanted, interspersed with other things, when I got half way down the list I had a conversation going on in my headset, so to reiterate his point I asked him 'and a lottery ticket?' to which he replied, in a sarky way, 'TWO lottery tickets, like I just said.'

Well, sorry mate, but I've got more going on in my head than just you and your tacky scratch card demands. Even if I hadn't had the conversation in the headset, long lists of things are not going to stay in my mind.

The assistant could have thought the milk was someone else's, she could have just spaced out, she may not have noticed it (even quite big things can become invisible when you've been sitting behind a till for hours). The only correct response to someone serving you is a smile and a thank you. Even if they cock it up.
 
Both yes and no.
I wasn't saying she was thick because of the milk. Or lack of dealing with it as the next item. It was more her apparent inability to recognise the 'cue' I gave by directing my gaze at the bottle and nodding my head towards it, and then I had to actually voice the words being formed by that action...."The milk?".
Sure, she could have 'zoned' out or summat I guess, and (unlike me :wink2:) I wasn't abrupt towards her in a rude way. It was just odd. If the whole of ones purpose is to sit there and scan items, from the right to the left, and ensure that you do all of the items between one divider and the next, it can't be that challenging TBH.
 
Trevp666 said:
Both yes and no.
I wasn't saying she was thick because of the milk. Or lack of dealing with it as the next item. It was more her apparent inability to recognise the 'cue' I gave by directing my gaze at the bottle and nodding my head towards it, and then I had to actually voice the words being formed by that action...."The milk?".
Sure, she could have 'zoned' out or summat I guess, and (unlike me :wink2:) I wasn't abrupt towards her in a rude way. It was just odd. If the whole of ones purpose is to sit there and scan items, from the right to the left, and ensure that you do all of the items between one divider and the next, it can't be that challenging TBH.
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You're not coming across very well here.
 
Trevp666 said:
Both yes and no.
I wasn't saying she was thick because of the milk. Or lack of dealing with it as the next item. It was more her apparent inability to recognise the 'cue' I gave by directing my gaze at the bottle and nodding my head towards it, and then I had to actually voice the words being formed by that action...."The milk?".
Sure, she could have 'zoned' out or summat I guess, and (unlike me :wink2:) I wasn't abrupt towards her in a rude way. It was just odd. If the whole of ones purpose is to sit there and scan items, from the right to the left, and ensure that you do all of the items between one divider and the next, it can't be that challenging TBH.
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I've got a shovel you can borrow to dig that hole a bit deeper.
 
Trevp666 said:
If the whole of ones purpose is to sit there and scan items, from the right to the left, and ensure that you do all of the items between one divider and the next, it can't be that challenging TBH.
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Have to disagree. One of the reasons I would never work on a factory line is because of the mind numbing repetitiveness and monotony.

It is even proven that more traffic accidents happen on long straight stretches of roads. People's brains become hypnotized (or something similar) due to the monotony.

If I were working all day scanning things over and over, I would definitely zone out. Easily. Sometimes the "ease" of the job is the problem. There is no mental stimulation. People's brains need stimulation.
 
brownmane said:
Have to disagree. One of the reasons I would never work on a factory line is because of the mind numbing repetitiveness and monotony.

It is even proven that more traffic accidents happen on long straight stretches of roads. People's brains become hypnotized (or something similar) due to the monotony.

If I were working all day scanning things over and over, I would definitely zone out. Easily. Sometimes the "ease" of the job is the problem. There is no mental stimulation. People's brains need stimulation.
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Well put Brownmane - and, Trev, cut the poor lady some slack! Working on a check out till is damned hard work and, I suspect, pretty ennervating for much of the time. There's no need to medicalise her temporary inattention either-she was just bored and took a brief zoning out holiday in her private thoughts is all.
escargot said:
Working on a till is not mindless labour. If it were, nobody would mind using self-service tills.
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Fair point. But this shows that, as well as having to repeatedly perform motor skilled operations, your check out worker should also possess an extroverted personality - which seems a difficult juxtaposition of skills. I sure as hell couldn't do it!

I myself always avoid self-check out options in shops and go straight to the counter where a human being is present. I have no desire to talk to anybody, but just that brief interchange with a fellow carbon based biped means something to me. I also have the feeling that, like so many other public services, they are outsizing their job onto us paying punters. One of my favourite Facebook memes that is doing the rounds at the moment is a cartoon of a sales assistant saying to a lady with a full shopping basket: `We have self-service tills here, madam`. To which she replies: `No thanks, I don't work here`.

And on that topic - the powers that be in the UK are in the process of of replacing ticket sellers in trainstations with `self-service` ticket machines. If we knew what was good for us, we'd stand foursquare shoulder-to-shoulder with the Rail Unions in opposing this!

Stormkhan said:
At school, we used to have fun by one of us standing in a public space, say an open shopping area. Another two would join us and we'd pretend to a conversation, staring pointedly at nothing in the air, sometimes glancing around and pointing up. After a time, we'd count the number of complete strangers, stopping in their tracks, staring up at the sky, trying to see what 'everyone' was looking at.
We'd just leave them to it. The largest crowds would last the longest, and this would gather the fastest with a large number of initial 'conspirators'. Prank? Yup. But also a good 'social experiment'. :D
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Another example of this power of suggestion of this came from a prank-the-publc based TV show that aired in the late nineties (from Northern Ireland as far as I can remember). One of their pranks consisted of having someone walk through a park dressed in a beekeppers outfit and holding what looked limke a wooden bee house. The person - an actor - would pretend to slip and the bee house would fall open. (This contained nothing, certainly no live bees!) The Members of the Public would respond by fleeing in terror - but also by swatting the air around them as though they were being attacked by actiual bees!
 
My preferred supermarket (Aldi) has recently opened some self service checkouts, after holding out a lot longer that the other 2 (Tesco and Morrisons) in our town. :( I've been gratified to find I'm far from the only one refusing to use them.

Zeke Newbold said:
but just that brief interchange with a fellow carbon based biped means something to me.
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Me too!
 
Sollywos said:
My preferred supermarket (Aldi) has recently opened some self service checkouts, after holding out a lot longer that the other 2 (Tesco and Morrisons) in our town. :( I've been gratified to find I'm far from the only one refusing to use them.


Me too!
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Every week I go to Asda during an evening to buy my beers and all the human checkouts are closed so I have no choice but to use the self service ones. It really annoys me.

What annoys me even more is the camera pointing at me plus the small screen that shows myself scanning my beers.

Big brother is here.

I wonder just how much those self scan checkouts cost and cost to maintain? The Asda I use had had replacements self scan checkouts several times in the last few years.
 
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Zeke Newbold said:
Fair point. But this shows that, as well as having to repeatedly perform motor skilled operations, your check out worker should also possess an extroverted personality - which seems a difficult juxtaposition of skills. I sure as hell couldn't do it!
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This was my point, that customers generally want a human being to take control of their shopping at the point of paying and bagging.

Till operators have all the skills necessary to take care of it for us.
We certainly miss them when we're directed to a self-service till.
 
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