Something i've been seeing more of recently is the installation of increasingly complicated machinery that does the work of normal people...now before you all start eagerly pointing out that this has been going on for years and chuckling at my apparent idiocy (wankers) i'll just say that i'm not referring to all the industrial robots that have replaced people doing dangerous or simple repetitive work since they are actually a pretty good idea and, more to the point, are things that normal people have no real contact with at all...so what am I blathering on about? I'm talking about the "helpful" machines that have started popping up in banks and large supermarket chainstores...ostensibly replacing people in jobs that (without wanting to sound offensive here) nearly anyone can walk into if necessary. So what's my problem? Well aside from the obvious employment implications of stores like Tesco's eventually installing a whole set of robot checkouts and banks doing away with assistants in favour of a wall of featureless machines my main problem is simple...they don't work :)

Let's start with the supermarkets shall we?...They installed a load of 'self-service' checkouts a few months ago in our local Tesco's and after the initial interest in playing with this new techno-toy faded I noticed a few things:
1 - Listening to the intensely irritating pseudo female robo-voice makes me want to kill people...perhaps it's just me but hearing that sodding thing bleat out *every* single thing that happens in it's wanky little voice just drives me up the wall.
2 - Tesco's are, essentially, making you do the jobs of their employees for them...for free...the cunts!
3 - They don't work...every single time i've used one of these infernal machines it's gone wrong, something doesn't weigh right or whatever and the tossy robo bitch spazzes out and it all stops working leaving you stood there looking like a complete plank waiting sheepishly for a real person to come along and help.
4 - Taking the last 3 points into consideration you eventually notice that, no matter how long the queue, you'll get through quicker if you just go to one of the normal checkouts...you know, the ones with real people on them.

Moving onto banks I recently had the questionable experience of HSBC's new paying in system (which is no doubt giving the customer more banking power by streamlining the throughput of their cash transactions...or some other such complete and utter toss written by someone in Marketing)...now call me old fashioned but when I go into a bank I expect to see a 'customer service' counter (where you go to beg the bank for more money) and a paying in counter, that's the standard...everyone know where they're going...no confusion, well not so in HSBC's case as they've decided to change the inside of our local bank into this vague empty space, there's a flashy looking desk that seats 2, count 'em, 2 customer service people and the rest is empty...and the result? poor confused bankers (heeheehee) wandering around aimlessly trying to find where the hell they pay anything in, all of us steadfastly ignoring the ominous looking wall of machines with 'Paying In' directly over them...now you may laugh at my apparent idiocy here but HSBC is not my bank...I was paying money in for my sister, therefore I had no card, therefore I couldn't use the wanky paying in machines, therefore what fucking use are they?

But do you know what the really amusing thing about these tossy machines is? That in both Tesco's and HSBC they've had to employ people to stand around correcting the million mistakes that the machines make all the time! You see whilst they may indeed be relatively simple jobs for people there is a vast difference between a person, who can think objectively about the many problems and variables that happen in any given situation, and a machine, which can't think anything other than what it's told to and the moment anything happens that's outside of it's programming it's breaks...meaning that at Tesco's there's now a proper till at the end of the robo-tills so that they can easily correct all the fuck ups, and HSBC has it's bank tellers wandering around waiting to point people in the right direction. I don't doubt that they'll get these machines sorted out eventually and that they'll become commonplace, after all they can work 24 hours a day, don't need lunchbreaks, don't need cigarette breaks, don't complain and don't ask for pay rises but I know that if they don't come up with better voices for the fucking things i'm going to kill someone! ;)