San Francisco is a petri dish of unnecessary technology innovation. So I shouldn’t have been surprised, upon arrival at San Francisco’s International Terminal, for my United flight, to see a huge line of people ushered along by a few human beings into a vast throng of kiosks. I’m used to kiosks. I bear them some ill will; but I don’t hate them. Especially if I’m going on a short trip and I’m carrying on.
But today I was checking. And, since it was an International flight, I couldn’t do curbside check in. I had to stand in the serpentine line. So I did. I’m fairly disorganized in real life, often finding out too late that I forgot to pay the power bill. But when it comes to travel I’m pretty organized: I had my passport and it wasn’t expired or anything. There were lots and lots and lots of kiosks. And there were two United employees in green jackets trying to help all the poor saps like me who were trying to use them. In my case, after running my credit card through the thing, it asked for me to scan my passport. So I put my passport on the little scanner, and a red light patrolled it up and down and side to side and up and down and side to side and up and down and side to side and it just kept on doing that. So I clicked the button that said Unable To Scan. Then I had to type in all of my passport information, upon which, after typing in my address and date of birth and passport number and issuing passport agency, the machine asked me to Please See An Attendant.
This is my problem with technology: most of the time, whether it’s talking to one of those computer voices on the phone or filling out some automatic form online or using an automated kiosk, when all is said and done some human has to try and fix the damage. You enter your member number on the phone and then a representative comes on and asks for your member number. It’s all so hugely inefficient.
This passport business had taken 45 minutes so far. And now I had to wait – impatiently I might add – for a human being. The few human beings on display went out of their way to ignore me or they would point ambiguously in some other direction or they were going on break. There’s a certain drone like quality to people who have jobs that create hate in their fellow man. The eyes are like a dolls eyes…
Finally, an attendant came along. I told her my problem and she proceeded to try all the things I told her didn’t work: she tried to scan my passport; then she rubbed it on her leg inexplicably and tried again. Then she entered in all the information and, again, the computer or robot, asked us to See An Attendant. Which is what she was! Finally, with a large sigh she walked to a terminal computer and typed in my information manually and I was on my way.
And so this occurred to me: this is precisely what is wrong with the country at the present moment. People are out of work because technology has replaced them with ineffective crap. If each of those kiosks was, say, a person, there would have been no line. I wouldn’t have had to wait over an hour because some software program didn’t do what it was supposed to. Instead I would have had that time to peruse, say, the airport mall, where I might have bought some useless crap I didn’t need.
Instead I had to race to make my flight – yep, I was one of those miserable sweaty bastards – and when I got to the gate, and handed over my boarding pass, it was only logical that the infrared wand they employ would refuse to beep, as they passed it over and over the boarding pass.
