1 Response to “links for 2008-07-15”

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   Jul 19th, 2008 at 8:38 am

   “Waiting in line is a very old-school way of dealing with scarcity. And treating new customers like old customers, treating unknown customers the same as high-value customers is painful and unnecessary.”

   I don’t know about you, but personally I don’t care much for watching other people get VIP treatment while I cool my heels in a line somewhere. Even if it means I also never get to be a VIP. First come, first served.

   I see things like this now and again that irritate me. For example, at the bank where I currently do my banking, someone jumped the queue one day — just walked in the door and straight to an available teller that had been idling instead of serving anyone else. Apparently they have “preferred customers” and a dedicated teller for these. Asshole should have to wait in line like everybody else!

   The local supermarket is no better — every so often I’ll see a line marked with a “next line please” sign where there’s actually an employee. Sometimes that employee is serving a customer that’s apparently more important than most, and thus gets to be served by this employee that won’t serve anyone much else. Other times that employee is doing something else, fiddling with a computer most usually, but not apparently serving customers. The latter I’ve also seen at that bank, and at other places, such as bookstores. If there’s clerical work to do, it should be done in a back office somewhere; an employee at a checkout counter not actually doing checkout just serves to taunt and annoy customers waiting in line for the other employees.

   In my previous town of residence, I also would sometimes see buses driving around “out of service” with at least one head visible through the windows other than the driver’s. Those big clunky diesel-guzzlers might be more efficient and “green” when packed with commuters, but when serving as someone’s private limo they are astonishingly wasteful, not to mention rude — that bus *could* be out there serving significant numbers of real customers and cutting wait times slightly, instead.

   (Of course, I have to wonder what sort of VIP gets a bus to himself rather than a real limo, or access to extra lines at the supermarket. A bank line restricted to the superrich is equally discriminatory but also makes some amount of sense, in a certain twisted way. I can only suppose that they’re middle management, or friends and relatives of the employees, or off-duty employees themselves, getting preferred treatment or using company vehicles as private chariots, and still envying the CEO’s actual limo and special treatment at the bank. :P)

   Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mind express lines, or things like Disney rides with fastpasses, because there’s no inequity based on class or similarly there. I can get a fastpass too, and if I have only a few items I can use the express line too, and if Mr. Three-Thousand-Dollar Suit over there has sixty-seven items he’s stuck waiting alongside the ordinary workaday Joes in the same set of non-express lines at the supermarket as I am. In simpler language, it’s not *unfair*, unlike the above-described instances of discrimination.

   Now moving on to the topic of the electrical socket 2.0 — I’m wondering if perhaps it’s actually meant facetiously? As a poke at the tendency of systems to develop creeping featurism, and particularly for version twos to have so-called “second system effect”, which is basically creeping featurism on steroids.

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