Hanging on the Line

Hanging on the Line
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday June 6, 2015

A dozen of us are waiting testily in the phone shop. We’re each clutching a malfunctioning device or a disputed phone bill. The atmosphere reeks of discontent.

Grudgingly, we split into three queues and align ourselves in front of the three young Ubermenschen standing behind the counter. I choose the line leading to a tall hipster-dude who looks technologically supreme behind his workstation.

With nothing to do but wait, I study the shop assistants. Hipster-dude’s black bushranger beard sits incongruously below the pale shiny dome of his head. But I admire his Lemtosh specs, which give him an air of a teenaged Woody Allen – before the neuroses embedded.

He abandons his terminal to fetch something from a back room. I notice he’s gripped from groin to ankle by a pair of jeans so tight they must be his sister’s. A long-sleeved gingham shirt with contrasting cuffs is suctioned under his waistband, the same shirt all his colleagues are wearing. I wonder if this phone company sees the irony in dressing its staff as cowboys.

Five minutes tick by and hipster-dude fails to reappear. His lady customer – one ahead of me – swivels to mouth me a “Sorry.” I give her an empathetic shrug. She turns back, rests her elbows dutifully on the counter and marks another few minutes by tapping out a ditty with polished fingernails.

The queue next to mine is becoming agitated. A burly fellow in a leather jacket is at breaking point. He sighs loudly and flaps his phone bill over his head as a female shop assistant deserts her workstation for the second time and vanishes through the rear door. Casting around for an ally, leather-jacket catches my eye:

“Bloody phone companies!” he says. “Happily take all your money but don’t wanna know you when they cock up!”

The gent behind him grunts agreement. The mood in the shop is one of barely-restrained rage.

That’s when I notice we customers are all of a certain age: there isn’t an unlined face amongst us. We’re now the serfs; our masters are the young techno-aristocrats. Since when did we depend on kids half our age to fix our mobiles and backup our lives?

I’m forever begging my teenager to help me meet the demands of my gadgets. This is a boy who at 14, could make me a Pentium chip using two Oreos, a paper clip and a ball bearing but still can’t spell biscuit.

“Just click ‘Yes’,” is his mantra.

“But what am I saying ‘Yes’ to?” I ask nervously.

“It doesn’t matter, Mum. Just say ‘Yes.’”

A movement at the counter catches my eye. The lady with the red fingernails turns to leave.

I feel a surge of optimism and dutifully step forward, proffering my iPhone 5 to hipster-dude.

“It just stopped working,” I say, fingering the cracked screen. “I tried to fix it, but it’s dead.”

My phone lies mutely on the counter. I peel off the hot-pink case and press the home button to demonstrate its uselessness. The screen remains an inky void. Stripped of its plastic finery, my iPhone looks old-fangled.

Hipster-dude begins pressing buttons in combination. In his smooth hands, my phone leaps to life and a dozen small icons reappear. Along the top, I see a little message pulsing. ‘SOS’ it reads.

“You’ve taken out the SIM card, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” I admit sheepishly.

“It won’t like that.”

“Well, I was trying to fix it.”

“You’ve put the SIM card in upside down!”

I wonder if he’s expecting my embarrassment or my indignation. Instead, I launch a pre-emptive strike to disguise my incompetence.

“I’m out of contract, aren’t I? How much to upgrade to an iPhone 6?”

I imagine the power shifting between us.

He points to a chart on the counter-top. “If you go to this plan, you’ll get one for free.”

“Great,” I say. “I’d like a silver one please.” (Hoping I don’t sound shallow).

Hipster-dude slips away to process my new contract. I glance at the queue beside me. Leather-jacket-man is berating the girl-assistant over his phone bill.

He jabs a finger at her and loudly demands a refund.

“Calm down, sir,” she says quietly. “I’m doing the best I can.”

He throws up his hands, swipes his paperwork from the counter and storms out of the shop, just as hipster-dude returns with my new phone.

“Geez! Does that happen often?” I ask, overtaken by a sudden surge of sympathy.

“All the time,” he replies wearily. “Phones make people crazy.”

He presents me with a contract as thick as the one Gina signed to start up the Roy Hill mine. Unperturbed, I sign away the next two years of my life. Clutching my shiny new plaything, I thank him and skip out of the shop.

Robo-Shop of Horrors

Robo-Shop of Horrors
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday March 8, 2014

I am being bullied by a machine who delights in being a shrew. We were wary of each other at first, that self-serve checkout and I. I tried not to think of her as a dictatorial tin can. I scolded myself for feeling intimidated by her sophisticated touch-screen interface and her beeping castigations. After all, she was one of a dozen talking robots designed to speed me through my  supermarket. We should have been friends. But it was clear from the start she had no interest in our relationship.

Maybe her automated woman’s intuition sensed my electronic incompetence. Perhaps she enjoyed lauding her artificial intelligence over my evolutionary one. Every time we met, she stared at me with her omnipotent eye, awaiting my first move.

I was moving all right – with both hands I was cartwheeling and somersaulting my Shortbread Creams in desperate pursuit of a bar code. Just as I finally located it on the inside of the underside flap, she announced loudly in a patronising tone: “Please scan your first item.” Her voice had the kind of velvety smugness my husband finds attractive. I felt a hot rush of jealousy. How dare she speak to me this way – me, the customer she was built to serve! I was on war footing with the talking robot at Coles.

I slapped my bananas onto her scale. “Key in item’s code or look up item” she demanded. I dutifully selected bananas while muttering about her lack of prepositions.

“How many?” she wanted to know.

“Can’t you see, cyclops?” I gloated. She was silent. I rolled my eyes and tapped in the number six.

 “Place item in bagging area.” I obediently dropped the bananas into the bag. She paused. “Unidentified item in bagging area” she said. I lifted up the bananas and let them fall in again.  “Item is not in bagging area.”

“Yes it is!” I shouted. “They’re right there! In the bag! Are you stupid?”

And then above her annoyingly square head she flicks her green beacon to an angry red.

I am trapped between this ogress and my overflowing trolley. I swivel my head  trying to catch the attention of a human in uniform. I see the shoppers behind me shift impatiently from one foot to the other. A young mother tears open a packet of Maltesers to pacify her whingeing toddler but the bag splits and the contents shower the floor.

I hail the blue-haired checkout boy from aisle six who raises his index finger to indicate he’s on his way. He plonks a plastic triangle on his conveyor belt that reads: ‘Let us serve you at another location.’ His next-in-line customer sends me eye-daggers.

Teenage employee arrives at my stalled machine and huffs: “The self-service attendant just ducked off to the loo. Bloody machines can’t fix anything by themselves!” He swipes the screen with a plastic card and my electronic she-devil springs to life.

“Please scan your next item,” she says to me sweetly, but I know she’s just flirting with the checkout boy, because he pats her stainless steel rump and trudges back to his cash register.

I am now embarrassed by the holdup. I resume scanning the contents of my trolley knowing a dozen pairs of impatient eyes are boring into my back.

“Remove unidentified object from bagging area” the she-robot barks.

“No,” I whisper urgently. “That’s the complimentary packet of pegs attached to this new washing powder.”

But she’s not buying my story and gleefully jams on her red light. I turn a shade of tomato myself. This can’t be happening! I lift out the washing powder and thrust the peg packet roughly up against her inky screen. “See!” I hiss. “They’re stapled on. The pegs come with it. It’s a sales gimmick!” And in a fit of pique I give her a secret kick with my left sneaker but she doesn’t flinch under her metal skirt. 

The self service attendant, fresh from his toilet stop, marches over: “I saw that,” he chides me. I gaze across at the manned checkouts and realise every customer I began with has finished and gone. I look to my right; my neighbour is also looking aggrieved. His machine’s red light is now blinking a slow waltz with mine. “Having fun yet?” I say.

“I just want this damn packet of chewing gum!” he says. “It doesn’t weigh enough to register.”  

“I’ve had it up to pussy’s bow with my machine, too. She’s been giving me a hiding.”

He nods sympathetically and points to his fem-bot who is chanting: ‘Select from popular items or look up item alphabetically.’

“With that kind of attitude,” he says, “no wonder she’s still on the shelf.”