By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO — Some time ago, I read an analysis of the traffic flow on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Apparently, the average speed (horse-drawn, of course) in 1905 was ten miles per hour. In 1985, polluted by emissions, it was five miles per hour.
This reality comes to mind several times a day as I continue to adjust to the cultural defectiveness of a world completely driven by computers, cellular devices, tablets, apps, and digital relationships. Think it takes less time to pay bills via computer? That’s funny. If you paid a creditor just a few months ago that way and decide to resume the practice, just try and not get locked out of the system because you don’t remember your username or password or the middle name of your best friend in elementary school.
And when that happens, who or what do you call? A telephone number is the now biggest corporate secret since Please Wait! became the defining idiom of touch-screen transaction. If you don’t get an android voice that has been calibrated to dehumanize you into a series of questions, surveys, diversions, refusals (especially if you are seeking access to a person of flesh and blood), you may get somebody in the Philippines or New Delhi who, let’s face it, is not exactly invested in your personal needs or particularly adept at what’s left of the English dialect.
The lingo of cyber land is a series of beeps, bells, diversions, and options that don’t opt. But all of this confounding dissemination of keys, symbols, codes, and 404s is not relieved when you are standing with the empty-eyed twenty-something kid at the scanning machine (ah, do you remember the reassuring clang of an actual cash register that spoke to something of real funds being traded and genuine change being made by persons as opposed to the lonely interaction to which we are proficiently consigned at the self-serve, encrypted check-out stands?).
If it’s at one of those franchise fast-food places, they take your order (“I’ll have a #7 without onions and the #5B Meal Deal”), mechanically hand you a cyber-receipt, assign you a number, and then tell you to have a nice day. Oh but then they hold you up by running some yellow highlight across a www.somethingorother.com and tell you to go onto your computer the moment you get home, click some answers about their service today, and if you return 79 of these surveys within 32 visits, you will get $2 off your next chocolate chip cookie or if you get 10 punches on their digitized rewards card (which sits in your wallet with 17 other orphaned rewards cards) you will have earned a free #9 with a medium drink from the dispenser. If you ask for an actual beverage from the little cooler behind the kid as opposed to using a numerically monitored paper cup, the entire deal is off, and you basically have made the kid explain what is wrong with you and the kid has to do this without texting it—which is amusing, sort of. In short, u r screwed.
We beat the Nazis with just gasoline and guts. Since we won, why can’t I get my bagel toasted without transmitting some business code and why doesn’t the computerized soap dispenser never work at the automatic sink I’ve chosen that does not spit out the quantity-controlled unit of lukewarm water I’ve tried three times to activate by waving my hands in a certain fashion that just doesn’t impress the digital gods?
If you enjoyed this article, don’t tell me in person. Sign on to my web site and punch in your answers on the survey that a consultancy in China prepared on my behalf. And notice how much it doesn’t matter and how much time you spent being so powerful and efficient.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com