So, I was getting ready to purchase an altogether too scrumptious sandwich at the local Supermarket, when I was faced with waiting in the self-checkout line or the one where actual humans got paid to do a job and work the machine for you. Since the lines were long at the self-checkouts, and because I’m another post-industrial, contact-starved person, I went for the standard check-out line.

The woman in front of me was paying by check. I don’t remember her total, but it was something and seventeen cents. The checker stated the price, and half a dozen little screens lit up with the number. The woman wrote her check, and handed it to the checker.

“I’ll have to give you change,” the checker said, opening the register and fishing out some coins. “You wrote the check for (whatever) seventy, when your total was (whatever) seventeen.”

This is when the woman in front of me exploded. Boom. Puff of angry smoke. Seething rage from a place straight out of a Lovecraft yarn.

“You said seventy!” she said, her voice quivering with anger.

Perhaps at this time it would be appropriate to give some more details. The checker was a dark-haired, medium complected woman in her mid forties. She had a slight accent. If you were to ask me, I’d guess that she was a native Spanish speaker, although the name on her nametag would suggest Eastern Europe. If you had to pin me down, I would guess that she was of South American descent. The woman in front of me was perhaps ten years older, lighter complected, with graying hair. She flashed a lot of her teeth when she spoke. She was probably once very attractive. She spoke as close to accent-less English as I’m capable of discerning.

The checker handed the woman two quarters and three pennies. “I want to speak to a manager!” demanded the woman, accepting the change. The checker picked up her station phone, and said something quietly.

Over dashed the manager. “How can I help?” he asked.

“If you intend to do business here,” declaimed the woman, “it would be to your advantage to have employees who can speak English.”

“What is the problem?” the manager asked. “What’s wrong?”

“My total,” said the woman. “She clearly said seventy when she meant seventeen. It’s not the money. It’s the principle. If your employees cannot speak the language, they cannot communicate with your customers.”

“Were you overcharged?” asked the manager.

“I have made my point,” the woman said, and with an exaggerated flourish dumped the two quarters and two of the pennies into the Leukemia Foundation Donation bin. The other penny missed the slot, skidded off the checkstand, bounced to the floor, and rolled off into oblivion. The woman turned, and walked forcefully out of the store.

The manager was short, and dark complected, with thick, curly black hair. His accent was clearly that of a Spanish speaker, and his nametag bore a typically Mexican last name.

I looked at the checker and the manager, and shrugged my shoulders. He shook his head, and walked away.

“How are you?” the checker asked me, smiling, as she slid my sandwich over the scanner. “That will be three ninety-five.”

I understood her perfectly.

Why do they have to be so damn difficult?

I’ve been working on upgrading my grandmother’s machine from a five or six year-old eMachine PII/300 running Windows 98 to a brand new Compaq deal I got at CompUSA along with a monitor and printer. The machine is reasonably fast, and, after I uninstalled all the crap that it came with and threw on some more reasonable software, I’m nearly at the point where it works the way she can use it.

Frustration 1. Moving files from one machine to another. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to use the network, as the old machine doesn’t have ethernet. New machine has no floppy. I could have uploaded all of the files via modem (probably get about 2 kB/sec), but that would have been painful. Easy, though, I’d use my USB memory key. Except that Win98 doesn’t natively support USB keys. Download the drivers… discover that they all want Win98SE, and won’t install. Grind teeth. Outcome: Success — finally had to use a USB CDR I had at home, since it at least had drivers on CD for Win98.

Frustration 2. Printer failure. The HP Deskjet 3915 just sits there flashing its light. Figure it’s a driver problem, so download 8MB of updates (over that mighty 2kB/sec connection). Still, nothing. Paper manual says that I should read documentation on CD. Documentation on CD says that I should consult the error code provided by the HP software. HP software says everything is fine. CD documentation’s best suggestion is to reboot. Windows thinks the driver is fine; HP thinks the printer is fine. The printer queue says it’s printing. Nothing ever happens. Reinstall drivers. Repeat. Outcome: still unsolved. Next step — call HP tech support. Oh, joy.

Frustration 3. Importing old mail from Netscape 4.8 to Thunderbird. Importing address book was simple — worked beautifully. But for old email, no such luck. There’s a tool “Wizard” for importing mail. But it doesn’t allow you to point it at files, it wants you to pick the profile. But it doesn’t see any profiles. I try putting the Netscape 4.8 user directories in all of the reasonable places (no, really. I tried all of them), but it never sees them. Documentation doesn’t yield any help. Try other directories. Try copying mail files directly into the appropriate directory in Thunderbird’s profile to no avail. Outcome: gave up.

Christopher Moore, 2002, Harper Collins

This is a book that was recommended to me a couple of time, and which I never tried to find. The premise — the “true” history of Jesus and his formative years, as told by his not-very-bright best friend Biff — is not only tired, but not very compelling. When you add in that the reviewers often mention that there are lots of fart and fucking jokes, I thought this was one to miss.

So when it showed up lying around in the living room (a loan from Paul & Jeanette), I only opened it to confirm my doubts. Turns out, however, the book is very entertaining. Sure, it’s full of juvenile humor, crude language, anacronisms, wildly improbable plotting, and elaborately-worked retro-explanations of traditions. But, that being said, it’s charming. It winks and giggles and lets you in on the joke — which is that it’s a respectful, if untraditional, imagining of the life of Jesus.

Bill Bryson, Broadway Books, 1999

Bryson is a very funny guy — a sort of erudite everyman, who relishes pointing out absurdity in the world and in his own behavior.

This book was written, as the title suggests, after returning to the States after living abroad. He returns, however, not to the America most of us Americans experience, but a picaresque small community in the north-east. The amusing observations, however, are more universal than this might suggest.

Bryson does not shy away form delving into political commentary, and saying essentially “what in the world has happened in the last twenty years?” Were it not for these more serious detours, the book would be “merely” an amusing collections of annecdotes, a presentation of a slice of life by a slightly cantankerous but overall benevolent spectator.

Jared Diamond, Viking Press, 2005

This book actually took me the better part of a year to read. In his studies of societal collapse, Diamond finds reasons for optimism; in his describing past collapses, it is difficult for me to find any.

Diamond is an engaging writer. With the exception of occasional passages where he throws out lists of numerical data, he paints very accessible pictures of civilizations both past and present.

As a researcher, Diamond loves to create enumerations (“these are the ten factors that determine success of an island society”), and, once he has them defined, he uses the model as fact. While I don’t doubt that he’s researched the factors, I’m not convinced that parameterization of highly complex, open systems is reasonable.

The most though-provoking parts of the book can be summed up by the question Diamond attributes to one of his students: “what did the Easter Islander think as he was cutting down the last tree?” Of course, by the point a single tree is left, it’s far too late to have any meaningful response. But where is the point where response is possible? When is it too late?

Diamond finds reasons to be optimistic. Unfortunately, I don’t feel that his research bears out that optimism. What do we have today that was lacked by the various failed civilizations he describes? It seems to me that we have two things: cheap, abundant energy, and widely distributed information. The former, however, is limited, and may fall into that “last tree” question above, while the information will whither without the energy to sustain its communication. Technology cannot save us without energy to drive it. And has human nature changed? Are significant numbers of people acting in a way that will lead to a sustainable population and way of life in this world? I don’t see it.