?The chain grocery store at which we shop has these nifty little self-service checkout lanes where you can ring up and pay for your groceries without requiring the assistance of a cashier. They aren’t so great if you have a huge cart loaded up with 70 or 80 items, but if you’re buying a pint of Mint Chip and a box of ballpoints, it’s really great. What makes it so great, at least at the store where I shop, is that these machines are almost always wide open, even though the regular checkout lines are stacked to the gills with people, several of whom are buying a small handful of items. I often ask myself why these folks don’t take a few more steps over to the self-service aisle, pay for their crap and get out of the store in a fraction of the time they’re going to sit in that line. I have a couple of theories:
- They’re scared of having to learn something new. Obviously, I don’t mean scared like a toddler is scared by shadows, but I do think that people look at the scan, bar code scanner and touchscreen terminal and think “man, I’d be so freaking lost if I tried to use one of those things…” The idea of having a line stack up behind them while they try to figure out how to ring up a pack of gum gives them an upset stomach (which means you’ll want Pepto, aisle seven).
- They’re lazy and know they could get out of the store faster if they took a few minutes to learn the self-checkout process, but are perfectly content to stand in the line and have the clerk do all of the work for them.
I actually don’t have a problem with the second group of people because they’ve made a decision; they’ve seen what appears to be a faster way of paying for their crap and have decided that they’re not willing to put forth the effort and they’d rather keep doing it the way they’ve always done it. Now, I almost certainly wouldn’t make the same decision, but that’s just because I’m constantly on the lookout for improved efficiency in all most of my life. No, I’d like to talk about the first group of people. Far too often, it seems, we shy away from beneficial changes or improvements because of either the effort that will be required of us or the simple fear of not understanding it and looking or feeling dumb. Another example might be the accountant who still hand-writes everything instead of generating forms using a computer, or a grandparent who has prints made of his digital photos and sends them to family via postal mail instead of using email (Note: I’m not saying that either of these practices are inherently wrong, just that there are alternate ways of completing the same business that are far more effective and take far less time). Learning is hard and avoiding new and ostensibly difficult things is so much easier.
Feeling overwhelmed by things like this is completely natural. I have a pretty good grasp on how computers work, but there’s about a zillion things that I don’t know a damn about: cooking, cars, finance… I could go on. Point is, it’s becoming increasingly more necessary to adopt nerd-like confidence; the idea that there are probably a whole lot of people out there dumber than me who have figured this out, so I should be able to figure it out, as well. It doesn’t mean that I won’t have to really work at it, but I will eventually get there and I am absolutely certain of this. Nothing is beyond me and, given sufficient time and effort, I can understand anything understood by another human being. Period.
The next time you’re faced with a situation or system that’s utterly foreign to you, keep in mind that you’re just as capable as anybody of making sense of it and, should you deem it worthy of your time, mastering it. For some people, that will mean walking over to the self-checkout lane at the grocery store and frickin’ making it happen. It may take time and you may need to ask for an assist from a nearby employee, but (like most things) it’s nowhere near as hard as you think it is; you just need to know (not think, know) that it’s not beyond you.
Photo by tkamenick
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