I'm sure it made sense when I wrote it down

The blackboard in my work room has accumulated a fine collection of...things.  Some of these make sense now, and some surely made sense when I wrote them down.  The random fractions are particularly opaque to me now, but I'm afraid if I erase them I'll need them.

Snow Drifts into Everything

From the NOAA Winter Storm Warning posted this morning.








It even gets into our words.  (You just can't see it here because of the white background.)


The snow also does a good job of covering the lilac bushes in front of the house.

Self check-out - a solution in search of a problem

I loathe self check-out.  Loathe it.  There was a time when the big box home improvement stores tried to go fully self check-out, but I noticed recently they've backed off from that and have brought back a few human beings.

Today at the grocery story the clerk minding the self check-out terminals hooked me in before I could sneak past her to the express lane.   And you know, she had trouble with the process.  She couldn't get the frozen orange juice to scan (nobody can.)

From a user experience point of view, you have to be seriously wall-eyed to be able to keep track of what the register terminal wants as opposed to the payment terminal, which, unlike the example above, is easily two feet away.

Why do we think it's a good idea to abandon the social contract between the well-trained customer and the well-trained check-out clerk?  My responsibility is to bring bags that stand up by themselves and to put all the cans of orange juice together on the belt.  The clerk is responsible for memorizing all those mysterious produce codes and for balancing the weight evenly across my bags.

I want my check-out clerk, darn it!