Elf Sternberg

I rarely encounter quite so blatant an example of “The Sociopathic Style of American Life” as I did yesterday. In that linked article, Paul Campos describes the who are anti-vaccine-mandate and anti-mask, who are committed to doing whatever the Hell they want and refusing to accept that the world changes around them, and who threaten violence if they’re not getting their way.

I’ve heard people, Democrats even, describe the King County “masks at all times, and you must show your vaccine card to enter a crowded venue” as “the rise of the Fourth Reich.” But vaccine mandates and immunization status records are not being deployed in service of some Great Nation ideology, nor do they targeting any particular faith or ethnicity. No, these things happen because there’s a sociopathic core in our country that will not do the responsible things, and so we have to up our vigilance.

Yesterday, as Omaha and I sat at one of the outdoor tables at our lovely cafe, I heard two men talking loudly at another table a few feet away. One of them told a story about a police shooting:

So this guy, I guess he lost his job awhile back, and he goes a little crazy. He killed his wife, then holed up in his house until the cops arrive. There’s a couple of hours of negotiation, and then he goes outside with his gun and points it at one of the cops. The cop shoots him.

I don’t see why anybody’s unhappy about this. The cop gets a kill and the family gets to sue the city. Probably walk away with a million bucks. Everybody wins!

He was laughing the whole time. He thought the entire tale was hilarious. A woman lost her life. A man lost his life. A police officer has to go for the rest of his life with a death on his conscience^*. Taxpayers are out a settlement amount of money that could have been used to pay for a dozen other civic projects that cities struggle to fund.

He was a classic bullethead of a business man: big, beefy, military-short cropped hair, wearing black slacks and a white shirt, sport coat, cell phone holster. As the conversation ranged out to the new boat he had just bought, I saw a man whose money and power had put so much distance between himself and ordinary people that he treated their suffering as a form of entertainment.

These people walk among us, and there are a lot of them. They will not stop to help a stranger and they will vote to make sure their power remains with them, and is never given up to anyone else. And they laugh at you when you talk about your suffering and your pain.

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^* It is completely consistent to believe that American policing is irredeemably corrupted by money, power, and immunity, and that it needs to be razed to the ground and rebooted in the Peelian tradition of community and honorable service, and that there are men and women in police uniform who deserve to be treated with respect and dignity.

The other day I broke my headphones (how is another story), so I went to Best Buy to get a new pair. At the register, I discovered that Best Buy had, like everyone else, gone to the chip-and-PIN system. I find C&P annoying; buying something is still a social activity, a brief exchange between two human beings. The swipe system was simple and transactive and allowed both involved to interact mostly with each other; C&P puts all of your attention on the chip reader. Starbucks understood this, and the C&P system they've rolled out is the least intrusive I've seen. Best Buy, on the other hand, has gone for an experience with its chip-and-PIN card readers that conveys a sense that Best Buy's hates you and hates having to deal with you. I have a rule that I will always buy from a brick and mortar over Amazon if it's within a twenty-minute drive. Best Buy's C&P system is so user-hostile I may reconsider that rule.

First, like almost every C&P system (but not, notably, Starbucks), you can't just shove your card in and ignore it until the transaction has ended. You have to look at the screen and wait until the machine says "Insert your card now." This is something UX designers call "active friction:" a transaction that used to be seamless now not only has its seams exposed but they're big enough for you to trip over them. Then it asks if I want the transaction in English or "Espanol" [sic]. It's Español, people; this is 2016 and Unicode is a thing!

The Best Buy C&P reader then asks if you want to sign up for a Best Buy credit card. Fuck no, don't ask me again. Upselling after the purchase transaction has begun is another hostile anti-pattern. Upselling by the machine is missing the point of having a human cashier!

After that, you get a screen that says "Do you want to treat this as a DEBIT card, or as a DEBIT MASTERCARD card?" I look at the cashier. "What does that mean? What's the difference?" He doesn't know, says it probably doesn't matter. I pick one.

The next page is the worst. "Accept Your Application? Yes / No."

Three screen back I was asked if I wanted to apply for a Best Buy credit card. Thinking I may have hit the wrong button, I immediately hit "No."

I get "Transaction cancelled."

The cashier says, "What happened?" I explained to him what happened, and he said, "Oh, that's not what that means. It wants you to confirm what kind of card you're using."

"It doesn't say that at all!"

"I know," he said. "It's awful."

So we go through the whole transaction again, I get past that screen, it asks if I want my receipt emailed. "Yes." The email entry screen is terrible, since the display is barely bigger than a cell phone. I'm repulsed again: can't they get my email address from the vendor?

Finally, "Enter your PIN." I do that.

"Use card ending in 1234 for this transaction?" Yes.

"Do you want to put all of the cost on this card?" Fuck, YES, already. "Transaction completed."

Ugh.

Compared to just handing over cash, there's so much friction in this exchange that it's hard to believe this is going to be the standard way we do business. It's so bad I would accuse Amazon of secretly engineering it to make the "One Click" buy-it-now process seem downright delightful. There are so many screens, so poorly worded, with so many easy misinterpretations and so many delays, that by the time I got to my car for deep loathing for what I had just experienced reinvigorated my desire to make my customers never have to suffer anything like that again.

Start with the initial impression that they don't really care that much for Spanish-speaking patrons (much less Vietnamese, Russian, Somali, Chinese, Korean, Ukrainian, Amharic, or Punjab, all of which are highly prevalent in my urban region). Add the deliberate confusion of the word "apply," the poor email address management, the sheer number of screens. Split-pay transactions like "Let me use up this gift card and I'll cover the rest with another card or cash" are pretty rare; to actually put this into the transaction flow that confronts every customer is goddamned stupid. That should be something the customer and cashier can work out together.

I'm a fairly technologically advanced human being. I write user interfaces like this for a living. That's my day job. I don't know if that makes me uniquely qualified to critique Best Buy's new C&P interface, but it shouldn't bewilder and upset me to use it. If I'm left confused by this point of sale tech, I can't begin to imagine what someone with far less education and experience goes through when they encounter this kind of bullshit.

Best Buy's point-of-sale chip-and-PIN interface communicates clearly that it doesn't trust the customer, expects the customer to be an idiot, and it expects to be able to use that idiocy to manipulate the customer into buying or agreeing to items they don't want. It also communicates clearly that it doesn't trust the cashier, either, by putting an unusual transaction workflow into the standard experience. So much attention is dedicated to managing this PoS (piece of [redacted]) that the usual pleasant social experience of dealing with a nice and competent cashier (and I got the impression mine was) was ruined. Until Best Buy changes their software, if you have to buy there, bring cash.

I'm not David Brooks, but allow me for a moment to extrapolate from two encounters with marijuana users I've had in the past twenty-four hours.

I stopped at a convenience store to pick up a soda pop; I was thirsty, and had been more or less "good" all day about my diet, and it was promising to be a long night ahead. While I was browsing the aisles, two women, one black and one latino, stood aside while a third woman, who was white, negotiated with the store manager for the purchase of what I thought she called "a hunter's scale." I had no idea what that was. The two other women, interested onlookers of some sort, were discussing the merits of slapping their child, especially the different effects it has on boys rather than girls. All three had the rough look, but the racial mix was fascinating; it was the kind of thing you see on a poster for "These are the women your charity helps" sort of thing.

I found the soda I wanted and walked back to the counter. She was still negotiating, but as she stood there, she said, "I can't tell, I think it's just a tenths scale, but I wanted a hundreths scale." Ah, I had mis-heard. "Can you tell?" she asked me.

On the counter was a tiny box about the size of a cell phone. She was weighing her earrings on it. "It's all about where the dot is. Everything left goes up, everything right goes down. Left: Ones, tens, hundreds of grams. Right, tenths. And then hundredths, if there was room for another number, but there's not. That scale only measures tenths."

"Well, that's not what we want," said one of the other women. "That won't tell us if the dispensary is ripping us off or not."

"Oh, I'm sure they are," said the woman at the counter. "You go ahead," she told me. "I'm gonna see if I can find a hundreths scale over there."

The second was a bit of voyeurism. She was one of those people whose overall affect announces, with some curious pride, that she was overfed and undereducated. She spent the entire bus ride on her phone, talking to her beau. "I'm so glad you're out, baby. I'll see you after work. Eight months is way too long to wait, I don't want to see you end up back there again. I don't know why we keep getting into so much trouble. I spent time in there, too, I know how bad it can get. But after work today, I got the rolling papers. I got my dispensary card. Hell, yes. I told some doctor I was all stressed out and had this pain in my neck and shoulder and shit, and he just gave me the note, and the place across the street hooked me up that same day."

I have, I hope, a bit of empathy for people who live on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. I have no illusions that my comfortable upper-middle class existence is anything but contingent on several happy accidents, the first of which involves being born white, male, and to parents who could afford to have me comprehensively educated. (A moral education took a lot longer, frankly.) I understand, to some extent, the way my privileges give me the free time and extra bandwidth necessary to plan my day and look further forward than my next meal or my next bed. Or my next drink, for that matter.

Yet between the conversation about the efficacy of smacking children, the socioeconomic costs of marijuana consumption, and the deception implied by that "... and shit" in the latter's conversation, and it feels to me as if both our culture and marijuana have a long way to go before the needs of real human beings are being met with something other than involuntary ignorance, bread, wine, and circuses from the cradle to the grave.

There are two truism about first impressions. The first is the one that your parents tried to impress upon you: never go by them. Whatever you think of someone's dress or mannerisms, there may be a great or lousy human being far along the spectrum from your first impression in the person you just met.

The second is that we do it anyway: that your first impression is the most important, it sets the tone and sensibility for all future transactions with the other person, and moving that gauge up or down is hard work.

Omaha and I were at Kouryou-chan's school for the monthly garden party. We were there at 10:00am, and parents started to trickle in for the next fifteen minutes. We supplied coffee and muffins, divvied up the work, and set to it.

At 11:00am, a car pulled up. A man and a woman got out of the car, and she did not look like she was dressed to get her hands dirty. "Hi," I said. "I'm Elf. You here for the party?"

The woman stared off into the distance, not really taking in any of the details. The man said, "Elf? I'm Doug. Yes, we are. What are we doing today?" I was taken aback. His manner wasn't arrogant, just very loud and foreward. He wore an earbug in his right ear, his smile was as bright and shiny as Bender's ass, and his voice was the kind last heard from Joe Isuzu. He had that amazingly firm and practiced handshake you get only from glad-handing as a career. Seriously, if you called up Central Casting and said you wanted an Asshole Salesman, this is the guy you'd get.

His wife barely twitched as he spoke. She was a small woman of Pacific Island descent, I'd guess, wearing a cotton white dress and pearls. Not clothes for getting dirty.

Okay, I told myself, calm down. He's not from Central Casting. I described to him the tasks on today's assignment, weeding, planting, cleaning gutters, picking up trash from the back parking lot. He never changed expression either, just held his rock-solid look of feigned interest. I said, "We started about an hour ago, and there's still plenty to do. Need some hours, eh? If you stay to the end, the two of you can put six hours on your tab."

"Is there one in May?"

"There should be. There's one every month. The hours cycle starts in the summer, so May will be the last one."

"Well, we have other things to do. I have money to put in the bank and, you understand. We'll come to the May one, won't we honey?"

"Mm," his wife said, nodding briefly, never turning her eyes away from a middle distance that seemed to see nothing at all.

"Yes," he continued, "We have other things to do today. Well, nice to meet you, Elf." And off he went.

Wow, even the second impression was terrible.

I had an interesting encounter this afternoon at the local mall. I can't stand going to the mall, but I had grown tired of Omaha having so many pairs of jeans and other clothing items with holes, and she agreed that it was finally time to replace part of her wardrobe. After trips to Jo-Ann's fabrics for art supplies and the hardware store for a replacement toilet valve, we dropped off at the mall where I man-shopped for a pack of socks. Kouryou-chan and I were at loose ends while we were waiting for Omaha to get what she needed, and so we wandered out into the main mall and up the concourse.

I was surprised by just how many stores were gone-- and by just how many kiosks were now littering the concourse. They were probably no further apart than was necessitated by fire codes.

We hit the bookstore and, on the way back, stopped by the kitchen gadget place. While we were there, I was looking at the gadgets and asked the woman behind the counter if they had any of the counter-top sous vide machines.

She looked at me with something like horror and so, "Oh, no, I don't think we should carry anything like that. There's some chef who raves about the technique but-- you're cooking with plastic. Who knows what that's doing to you?"

Actually, we know quite a bit. At the temperatures at which sous vide operates (between 130°F and 160°F), not much. The food-grade bags made by Ziplock emit nothing that can be detected, according to Consumer Reports. (I checked, but you'll need a subscription to find out for yourself, unfortunately.)

It was just your typical odd encounter.

Omaha had some political event going on Wednesday evening so I took Kouryou-chan out to the local swimming pool, and while we were there I had the most peculiar encounter with a teenage boy who I'd estimate was around sixteen years of age.

I was showering off after the swim. The shower is a large, open space with a pair of towers covered in showerheads. He was under one tower, and I was under the other, and he turned to me and said, "Have you ever cheated on a woman?"

While what happened between Der Ex, Omaha and I was far messier than anything Senator John Edwards (D-North Carolina) or Senator John Ensign (R-Nevada) went through, I rationalized that it could accurately be described as cheating and, curious to see his reaction said, "Yeah."

"Oh," he said. "'Cause I think I just made a big mistake. I got this girlfriend, and she's like, 15. But now, I made a date with a 17 year old and, like... I mean, my girlfriend, she's nice and all, she's not a slut. I mean, the 17 year-old's not either, but she'll fuck me." I refrained from commenting on this pasty, pudgy specimen of manhood. His eyes were lit up with something far more primeval than contrition.

"Well," I said, "Just don't get either one pregnant. You'll fuck up your life for the next twenty years."

"Yeah, but, she's on the pill. Ain't nothing gonna happen."

"I'm just sayin'," I said. "Just don't do it. It'll take your whole life in a direction you probably aren't ready to go."

"Nah, nothing's gonna happen." He left the shower and went to the lockers to talk smack with his friend.

Omaha said I should have been a little more forceful about condoms and responsbility. I felt weird just having the conversation.