Nice computers don’t need to go to the toilet

Ever been invited to a party only to discover they gave you the wrong address? This doesn’t occur to me often but then I’m not the sort of person whom people invite to parties. Anyway, this wasn’t a party, it was a user group meetup.

It was, in fact, the last time I attended a user group meeting. Eight years ago. This is what happened.

Imagine me, having made an attempt to smarten up a bit, travelling across London and deliberately restricting myself to just the one double Scotch on the way. And I find myself alone inside a tiny, utterly vacant venue.

Instead of a conference suite in an office building, Google Maps has led me to a pop-up shop that was about the size of my bathroom. It is trendily tiled in white with chrome fittings, so it even looks like my bathroom. So when I say it is a ‘vacant’ venue, I am actually tempted to lock the front door behind me so that it would indicate ‘Engaged’.

Inside the pop-up-shop-bathroom, I fight the almost irresistible urge to drop my trousers and begin singing. This is just as well because at the other end of the shop, where the shower ought to be, is a young shop assistant. We are alone.

My heart sinks. I will need to communicate with her but I am not very good at talking to shop assistants in shops, let alone bathroom assistants in bathrooms. And I am especially bad at trying to explain to someone standing behind a till that I am one of 50 invitees who will soon be cramming into the kiosk-sized venue to hold a scheduled to a meeting of our software user group.

This evening I am in no mood for doing the usual shouty-Englishman-in-a-pith-helmet routine. So I linger near the door, admiring the tiles and chrome, pretending to be "just looking". My pretence is not very convincing since the shop is so trendy that there are no goods to look at, just large promotional slogans on point-of-sale poster boards. I pretend to check my mobile phone and pretend to answer a pretend call while politely walking out of the pretend shop to continue my pretend conversation.

I wonder if I’d simply turned up too early, so I nip back to the wine bar on the ground floor of the hotel across the road for a refresher. Not only does it have a wide range of whiskys, it has posh toilets with a ‘toilet guy’ hired to spray posh aftershave in your face as you leave. There’s even a glass presentation case at the entrance of the toilets promoting these expensive aftershaves. In other words, the hotel has a bathroom that looks like a shop.

Here’s the sign on the toilet door.

Best to cover all bases, I guess.

On the inside of the door there is a motivational poster for you to read before leaving. In the pre-LinkedIn days, a motivational poster at the exit of a public bathroom would motivate you into doing something useful such as washing your hands. The one on this door says: “Why don’t you high-five the next person you meet?”

Good idea. I step out of the bathroom that looks like a shop and high-five the first person who walks past. As I do this, I tell them the bathroom has run out of soap.

Another double Scotch later, I return to the shop that looks like a bathroom.

Still no one. Nothing else for it. I walk over to the shop assistant, take a deep breath and prepare myself for that unnerving concentrated "are you mad?" look that they always give me as soon as I begin speaking.

Before I’ve uttered a word, she asks me if I’m here for the user group meeting.

She apologises for the venue mix-up and explains how to get to the correct location. It’s in the hotel across the road, where I had just been. I return to it, treat myself to another stiffener at the bar and a top-up of musk in the bogs. By the time I enter the conference room to greet my user group peers, I stink like Pepé Le Pew.

It does make you wonder what might have happened if the tiny pop-up shop had been staffed not by a helpful young person but by a computerised auto-till, like you get in supermarkets and Amazon Doh! stores. (That is what they’re called, isn’t it? )

Now, you will be aware that customer-facing staff are increasingly being replaced by computerised tills and touchscreen service. Who needs all this wasteful lack of communication and inefficiency when a computer can do it just fine!

Well, quite apart from the atrocious interface design of self-service retail tills – whose operation is akin to the running of a late 19th century steam engine with all their buttons and knobs and wheels and spinning things and all manner of fiddly shit dotted all over the bastard place – the very concept itself labours under two false assumptions.

The first is illustrated by my inadvertent visit to the hipster bathroom retail experience. Almost nobody walks into a shop, immediately locates what they want, pays for it with exact change and leaves without a word. Rather, they stumble in looking confused, ask for directions, can’t find the right product, look for alternatives, chat with the cashier while the latter wipes the grime from their credit card chip, forget their PIN for a moment, drop things on the floor, tear the plastic bags and stagger out at their own pace. The shop’s long-suffering staff will, as ever, do their best to help.

Just try any of the above with a self-service till. It would not give a flying fuck even if you walked in and dropped dead on the floor.

As soon as you make the slightest deviation from its own programmed workflow, it metaphorically sticks up two fingers, waggles its metaphoric nob in your face and suggests you ask for assistance from a human being – which is what you wanted in the first place.

IT solutions like this are designed for their own convenience, not yours.

The other deliberately false claim is that self-service tills cost less to run than people.

Such bullshit can be experienced in high street banks up and down the country, where relaxed cashiers seated behind glass-fronted counters have been replaced by exactly the same number of anxious-looking, clipboard-wielding staff whose sole job is to wander around the branch looking lost and occasionally pointing out to customers which of the self-service tills have broken down that day.

Remember the old line about computers not needing to go to the toilet or take lunches? I’ve actually had people quote this to me who didn’t realise it was an industry in-joke.

I’ve even heard it said that a computer never needs training. Yes, apparently computers simply know what to do and get on with it. They never fall ill like people either, do they? They don’t require rest periods to recover from over-working. They cost next to nothing to run. They don’t require support, assistance or maintenance like people do. They never need to be retired.

Yup, I’ve heard it all said to me with a straight face.

I usually respond with vigorous nods of earnest agreement. An automated cash till cannot be bargained with, I add. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

I fear the next time I get invited to the wrong party venue and ask for directions, the automatic cash till at the end of the pop-up shop will respond “Fuck you, asshole” and blow me away with a pump-action shotgun.

It’s the future of retail, kids!