‘ve been thinking for a while now that I really ought to start a new series of curmudgeonly rants here on Simple Tricks called “Things That Suck About Living in the 21st Century.” Now, to be fair, this is a pretty amazing time we find ourselves in. We have technologies and luxuries undreamed of only a few decades ago: we can carry thousands of songs around on objects the size of a pack of smokes (or smaller, depending on the model); DVDs and hi-def TVs are a boon for movie fans (although they arguably come at the price of losing — or at least drastically transforming — the communal theater-going experience); the InterWebs give joe-schmoes like me a public forum to talk about any damn thing we wish, as well as a means of tracking down all those obscure Star Wars collectibles we missed out on as children; and the new Dodge Charger is a pretty damn nice-looking car. (That last one was for Anne; enjoy, honey!)
But there are also a lot of stupid little annoyances these days, stuff that can only be explained as a result of somebody, somewhere, abandoning all common sense. It’s like some evil, shadowy cabal somehow gained control over the workings of our society and decided to redesign all those everyday items and mundane procedures that used to work just fine for the express purpose of driving people crazy.
My first example: cash register receipts.
Seriously, what the hell is it with cash register receipts these days? It used to be you could buy 50 items and spend a couple hundred dollars, and the checker would hand you a modest slip of narrow paper. Simple, efficient, easily filed, really a thing of elegance when you think about it. Nowadays, however, picking up a single tin of Altoids at Target nets you a two-foot-long, three-inch-wide ribbon covered in information, only a very small portion of which is actually useful. All the rest of that printing consists of the store’s logo, address, phone number, hours, holiday hours, manager’s name, and probably the chain’s recent stock numbers, if you took the time to actually read all that crap; you’ll also find a bunch of electronic gibberish that means nothing to anyone who isn’t a computerized cash register; the obligatory customer satisfaction survey, the legalese describing such, and the URL to access it; the store’s return policy, spelled out in agonizing detail; and then of course all the preceding information repeated en Espanol, for the convenience of our burgeoning immigrant population.
Then, on top of that, you get another receipt, the gift receipt, just in case you intend to give this tin of Altoids to a friend who doesn’t really like Altoids and will end up bringing them back to swap them for a plastic box of Certs, only you don’t want this friend to know how much the Altoids cost, presumably because he would assume you were a cheap bastard for spending so little on him for Christmas.
As if all that isn’t enough, when you pay with a debit card, some stores (not Target, but some places I’ve shopped) will then provide you with a third receipt. This is your special debit card receipt, which includes pretty much all the same information covered on the first receipt, only with some additional data taken from your card, specifically a long string of Xs that end in the last four digits of your debit-card number. You know, in case you use so many different cards during the day that you can’t remember which one was used to buy that tin of Altoids and which one you paid the mortgage with, or something.
How many trees have we killed at this point, all on a single purpose? The whole thing reminds me of an old Looney Tunes cartoon in which a fantastic, Rube Goldberg-style automated factory grinds an old-growth redwood into sawdust to produce… a single toothpick.
Not only are these monstrous, elephantitis-inflicted receipts wasteful, but they’re a pain in the tuchus as well. Literally, sometimes. Remember that Seinfeld episode where George’s wallet is stuffed so full of receipts and random scraps of paper that it finally attains critical mass and bursts, spraying his stuff all over the street? My wallet is like that all the time… and I’ve only got two or three receipts in there!
How did we come to this? Why did we come to this? Is all that information really necessary? Does anyone ever use any of it? Or is this just another example of some kind of insane corporate cover-all-contingencies thinking run amock? You can probably figure out which way I’m leaning on that question.
Ridiculously overgrown cash-register receipts: Item Number One on Bennion’s List of Things That Suck About Living in the 21st Century. More to come…
