WORDS FROM W.W. April 14, 2018
Whenever I think I’m smart and need to have my intelligence altitude lowered to C-level I just go to the supermarket and try to figure out how to use the “digital coupons!”
Last week Tide detergent pods were on sale, plus there was a digital coupon that you could use (If you were more intelligent)! I brought the container to the checkout lane, and confessed to the cashier, like the wayward penitent sinner that I am, that I was not “app-savvy!”market
She looked at me and started asking me questions that were a technological foreign language. To my mind they sounded something like this:
“Did you download the app and wash behind your ears with body wash, and then put some butter on your toast as it lay on the sidewalk while offering to sacrifice your first-born and waiting for the postal carrier to bring your new magazine by?”
“Huh?”
She gave me a momentary annoyed expression, because there was now two other people behind me in line- the line I had chosen because there was no one behind me and I thought I could receive a hint of grace from her!
Remember when you were raising your kids who had just learned how to tie their shoes? Remember the time when you were in a rush and they were taking a month to tie the knots so you just finally reached down in a huff and tied them so you could get out of the house before the rapture?
Well, that’s kind of what the cashier did! She just finally gave up and punched in some kind of secret code that she learned in the cashier’s secret society and gave me the extra two dollars off. I was melting away as I stood there, feeling the stares of the two people behind me and the scorn of “Ms. IBM” behind the counter!
I bet she would also be clueless…back in the day…if she had to bring a goat to the market to trade for flour, beans, and potatoes!
A friend of mine told me about a similar experience using the digital coupons at a different store where he was made to feel like one of the indentured servants of the business. There was some kind of glitch with the app that he had and after going through an employee who looked at him like he was a wandering vagabond he encountered a manager who said something like, “You know…this is a privilege to have this. Not everyone gets it. You understand that, don’t you?”
Memories of standing before the elementary school principal occurred!
Not all of us have been able to figure out digital coupons or, for that matter, anything that begins with the letters “a-p-p”, except “appricot”, “appalled”, and “apple”…scratch Apple!
We are from the slower generation that were amazed when adding machines came along. We watched episodes of “Lassie” where they had to ring up Jenny, the Calverton telephone operator, to call the neighbor down the road.
So now we of the slower generation are weighing whether it’s worth the embarrassment to save that fifty cents on Hamburger Helper by presenting our cell phone to the store cashier. It’s the equivalent of walking into church with your pants unzipped…which I’ve also done!
Words from WW Blog 