Self-service can get ridiculous
DO you like the self-service culture? Often, I don’t. I think, in many cases, it is a case of mass enslavement.
A local news report a few days ago tells of the great inconvenience of paying for parking fees at the prestigious Kota Kinabalu International Airport terminal.
The system forces motorists to use a slot machine which requires them to “stop before the gate, get out of the car, walk 20 metres across a busy exit road…” and then slot in the card and money, walk back across the dangerous road, go back to the car, restart the engine, and when at the gate, slot in the paid parking ticket again. And these all have to be done rain or shine.
How very ridiculous! Isn’t it more convenient and happy for everyone if there is an attendant at the gate to slot in your ticket and receive the payments?
Motorists may even get a nice smile and greeting to make your day. Self-service culture has done away with the precious human touch in services, and has caused unemployment to many.
“Self-service” has become a serious problem for customers in these so-called advanced modern times. People are expected to pay for doing things themselves, and suffer from confusion at the same time.
The culture of self-service has caught on as a supposedly popular practice all over the world, an apparent sign that the world has become more mechanised, convenient, efficient, and at the cutting edge in functionality. Well, not really.
Self-service tests the human patience to some extent, especially for older people like me whose brains have stopped growing new synapses a long time ago, making it very difficult to learn new skills, like punching incomprehensible buttons.
I remember when I was first forced to use the machine to buy train tickets. The emotional trauma was like facing an examination for which I didn’t study for.
With no alternative of buying from a human ticket dispenser, and no one around from whom I could ask for help, I saw a dark tunnel of terror which soon turned into a vision of fire of anger and utter frustration.
The case in Britain was illustrative how risky buying tickets from TVMs (ticket vending machines) are. They left baffled commuters overcharged, ended up on the wrong trains, and collectively paid millions of pounds in unjust penalty fares.
Nil Tweedie reports in the Daily Mail that, “In 2013, a staggering £52 million is estimated to have been collected from passengers in penalty maximum fares.
"And although some £22 million of that was refunded, that left customers £30 million out of pocket…. some of those customers were guilty of fraud and would have been fined if caught – but it’s inevitable that innocent travellers will be penalised.”
Going to a self-service restaurant is now the in-thing. But, think about it: why don’t we get discount for doing things which the shop assistants should be doing?
It would be a lot fairer if there is an alternative to get full human services for the normal full prices, and another alternative to do it all self-service at a discount.
Self-service means going through all the inconvenience of taking the plates, the spoons, the chopsticks, the chilly, sauce and vinegar, your own foods and beverages, paying for them, and carrying the items to your tables, sometimes spilling them.
A more ridiculous case of selfservice occurs at the petrol-filling stations where the attendants are standing around with their hands on their hips, and watching us go to the counter to pay and grudgingly fill up our tanks.
Sometimes the attendants, having nothing else to do, venture to do us a favour by wiping our windshields clean, as if to placate our resentment to all the silly modern petrol station protocol.
Of course it’s not politically correct to complain about the self-service culture. Even the consumer associations seldom, if ever, make an issue about it for fear that they would be seen as ultra-conservative and antiprogress.
But how can we ever set aside the in-born human nature of wanting to be served and pampered? Who doesn’t want the enjoyment of being entertained, being served with what we need, to feel the human touch, like the saving hands of doctors and nurses on our physiques in clinics and hospitals.
It can never happen that one day our brains will be modified to enjoy self-service more than services rendered by other humans.
Self-sex can never be better than mutual sex! John Naisbitt in his books reminds his readers of the indelible need for “high tech high touch” – the ever-present need of humans for mutual interactions in the progress of ever more technological applications.
Humans are social animals; they get miserable in lonely spaces. Save for the few who thrive in solitude, like poets and vagabonds, people are generally in need of companionship, and enjoy life more with loving care and services.
As such the new culture of selfservice can be often antithetic to human nature. Instead of contributing to greater human happiness, it can often contribute to human miseries, adding to the already hectic, competitive, emotionless and soulless motions for survival of the modern homo sapiens.
In our long struggle to seek utopia, we are dragging ourselves much closer to dystopia with the self-service culture.
No doubt the world will introduce the idea of self-service to other sectors of customer activities in the future. No doubt it can be very beneficial.
In banking, the ATMs have proven to be the blessed facility to deal with many banking transactions. Indeed there are sectors in the market in which self-service is preferable as it makes things easier and more efficient. But like many things, self-service can be extended to be ridiculous extents.
In Britain they tried getting supermarket customers to check out by paying for what they buy by using check out tilling machines. It didn’t work as the system drove customers away because it was difficult to do.
In the US there are cook-ityourself restaurants! If you want to cook your own food, why not cook at home? We go to restaurants to taste new and better-tasting foods cooked by experts, not to taste what we can cook at home.