Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Unfamiliar technology

I am still too distracted to settle in to drawing. I was asked last week to submit some kind of design for a competition related to possible uses for all that cedar wood standing on the mountains. In the end I only managed to send in a description of this type of stick chair construction. Anyway working on that took up a lot of the day. This chair is in my sons room, but slightly grubby now as the dog rubs his ears along the front of it.
I had resolved to hand in the thing personally as the office is quite nearby and it was 40% off day for icecream at our local supermarket so I went along to collect some deserts on the round trip. My wife handed me the little point card for the supermarket as I was leaving, saying she didn't really know what good it was. I said I would ask at the shop. The cashier explained that there was a little machine in the shop for you to check your points on. Incidentally, the cashier is no such thing any more, simply a device for passing things over a bar code and feeding money into the register. There is no handling of change or calculating done, the machine eats the money fed to it through slots and feeds the change out down a chute.
The little card machine confounded me for a moment as I couln't figure out what to do with the card to get it to read it. There was a little slot on the front, and the display, that was all. I could read the instructions, "Kazasu" your card with the bar code facing up, but I had no idea what the word "Kazasu"meant, so that was no help. I tried the card in the slot in various ways, crouched down and sniffed it, or at least checked it out like the primitive form of primate I am. Then somehow it hit me that all I had to do was put the card on the little counter of the machine and an almost invisible laser mesh would scan it. It made me chuckle, for a second, then it got me again by showing me three boxes and asking me to chose one on the display. I couldn't see the point, but did it. This was a little enticer for the customers, it gave you a chance to win two points or one. Then finally I got to the main screen where it said I had 1945 points and I could get up to three coupons for 500 points that were worth one yen per point. So I did and chuckled again to see the coupons being spouted out of the slot I had explored tentatively with the card edges. It was unfortunate that I was not a little more cautious with the machine, I could have saved myself all the hassle of learning to handle this unfamiliar technology by just sidling about for a bit and observing. Nearly every customer seemed to stop by at the thing and pass their card to get their little bonus point three card choice. I suppose it indicates the state of the economy in some way. We can still afford the luxury of a drop of icecream, but we take the trouble to buy it on the day when it is 40% off. A lot has changed at this shop since I was last there a month or so ago.