A Rant of Kiosks and Consequences

Walk into a fast-food restaurant with a self-serve kiosk and you're bound to find some entitled asshole insisting that one of the overworked, underpaid teenagers has to stop what they're doing to place an order, because the kiosk isn't paying that asshole's wages.

Am I crazy, or is it usually the same generation that slobbed on that Microsoft floppy for spreading the convenience of computers around the world? Now, when we're getting replaced by computers in the name of convenience, they throw a temper tantrum, not for the loss of jobs, but for a return to the good ole days when customer service had to bend over to service customers.

When you're walking that mile around Costco, filling up your own basket with items you had to find yourself, do you hit the floor kicking and screaming because 100 years ago, a shop clerk was getting paid to fetch your flour from the back room? Of course not. It's just the last step of the process that seems to piss people off these days with their petulant self-fellating about who's getting paid to do what. Forget that the cashiers still aren't paid a living wage.

I'm at the gas station, buying a breakfast biscuit when the self-checkout gives me a choice between a giant red button with a cartoon flame labelled "hot" and a giant blue button with a snowflake labelled "cold." And the poor cashier is on his touch screen, racing me to touch that button just to feel needed for one second. Because he's been reduced to a human claw machine who can only fetch cigarettes and liquor.

I deliver food for a living, working for an app, so I'm no stranger to this story. Two teenagers salting the fries with their blood, sweat, and tears, jumping between six different workstations to keep up with the drive-thru when some dude, old enough to be their father starts complaining that his lunch break doesn't last long enough to wait for service at the counter. I say too bad. Welcome to the hell that you helped create. Instead of yelling at kids who can't afford health insurance--let alone to deal with your bullshit--use the fucking kiosk. Should we find a toddler who can show you how it's done? He's got the gall to call them minimum wage morons, when he can't figure that shit out?

CEOs supplement skeleton crews with kiosks, and history tells them all that we will accept it, just like self-service gas pumps and grocery stores. Because they forgot it was the breached hull that sank the Titanic, not a lack of partygoers.

"If you don't like it, get a better job" might have worked back when all it took to get a job was a nice outfit and a firm handshake. But now, I have to spend hours filling out forms online, trying to remember every job I've ever had, and at the end of it all, I still have to convince some middle manager--who's only in that position because he's dumb enough to kiss the machine's ass with a smile--that its worth paying me real human dollars to do a job a machine can do for free.

So don't blame the exploited teenager for not smiling while he takes your order. Because every minute he has to waste talking to you about the weather, is a minute he has to stay late stocking shelves because his boss apparently gets paid too much to help him out, and you don't get paid enough. So, he's stuck in-between a rock and a hard place getting told by everyone what he's getting paid to do, and he's barely getting paid at all. And he would gladly kick you out on your ass if it didn't mean that same idiot manager would comp your meal and rob him of a week of labor for poor performance.

So while you're drowning in the debt you took on, for that piece of paper that entitles you to health insurance. He's drowning in poverty because society doesn't think he's worth taking care of. And the truth is you're both drowning, but he's Leonardo DiCaprio insisting there's room on that floating rubble for two, and you have your foot on his head. Meanwhile, the only ones profiting are the fat cats on dry land who insured the sinking ship.

It's that same guy who will call that kid lazy and ignorant when they need help changing a tire, because he's swallowed the capitalist load: profit over people, status over empathy, and treating unskilled workers like shit.

But hey, I know in thirty years it will be the same shit, different flavors. When my home teleporter can't self-diagnose and report an error because it's malfunctioning, I'll be bitching about having to manually jack into the matrix, find the service number, and actually talk to a representative myself, or at least the A.I. chatbot that holds the position. How humiliating that will be. And God forbid there's ever a power outage and I have to use my actual, physical hands to open a door.