One of the frustrating things about modern life is that modern technology puts you into these nowhere zones where you don’t know what to do or how to respond; young people are pretty good at shutting down and rebooting, or whatever is necessary, but I am often dazed and unable to respond.

One example happened at the Wal-Mart self checkout. Usually I don’t like self checkout because I am so slow at it and the real clerks are much better at it. But in this case I only had about eight things and thought I’d do it myself, do it as they wanted to save them some man-hours. But one of my items was a pair of three-banana bunches; they didn’t have any with six or more, so I’d gotten two with three each, and I weighed them together, since they were both bananas. Somehow the scanning machine got a picture of me putting two separate things in the bag together, and froze up on me. The clerk came over.

I, however, was simply dazed. I didn’t know why the machine would freeze up and couldn’t figure out what to do next. The clerk could see that I wasn’t trying to pull one over on them so after a minute or two he just restarted the machine. But while we were standing there I noticed that the machine had taken endless pictures of me scanning items and was trying to point out, to him, what it caught that seemed to be a problem. I had scanned both bunches together – did it look like I had slipped one in underneath the other?

These days I come home from the exasperation of dealing with the modern world and do research on ancestry.com and newspapers.com. I found a great grandfather who ran a crockery store in the 1920’s in a partnership; the store was called Swain & Mauer, and he was the Mauer. But around 1923 he had an idea: have a grocery store where people check themselves out; this will save the store money on clerks and the savings would be passed along to the customers who would pay less for their groceries. It was kind of a 1920’s ALDI’s, and it opened with great fanfare; this was in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

But by 1927, he died on the road working for Ney Manufacturing, in Watertown, South Dakota. This was important because my dad was born in 1927, and probably never got to meet or know his grandfather. I have yet to tie down the details exactly and may have lost track of some of the details. But dying on the road as a traveling salesman (I assume) makes me think of him as somewhat of a Death-of-a-Salesman type character. In fact maybe the play Death of a Salesman was written about him.

He could have told them, this self-checkout business is totally bogus. Walmart is not the only store that invested millions in self-checkout scanning machines that are apparently putting our every move on camera. But we the people don’t like them. I don’t entirely trust myself even when my intentions are good; I’ve made several mistakes that I know of. And I have this one problem when I am buying only something that doesn’t scan, and the machine won’t start up until you scan something. The item I have in mind is refills of water, which you have to type in, because there’s no other way to buy them. It’s a nowhere-land scenario where to me there is nowhere out.