So I went back to work today for the first time in 8 months, and everything has changed. They’ve installed all sorts of new technology, and it’s making me feel like an old fogey. Not one piece of equipment has stayed the same since I started working there four years ago. They’ve streamlined the process so much that I hardly do anything anymore. Except for remembering produce codes, I’m hardly even sure why they have me there.

I’m not really the Luddite type normally. I have a blog, and I do tech. support at school, I know my way around computers. There is the cell phone thing, but point being, I’m normally at least moderately hip. When it’s on my private time, I embrace technology wholeheartedly. But at work, it’s different. It’s not that I can’t use the new technology, or even that I think the technology is a bad idea. There’s just a certain nostalgia for doing things “the old way.” That holds true for any frame of reference, whether the old way is forty years old or four. There’s no real reason to be nostalgic about ICOT slips or pulling tills. I’m not trying to romanticize the noble occupation of grocery store cashier here. But nonetheless, I still have that nagging feeling that things were somehow “better” when my mind had six things to do at a time instead of one.

Logically, I should be happy. After all, less time filling out paper and less time dealing with accounting means more time talking to customers. That should be good, right? Maybe talking to customers is just more boring than I realized. Obviously, I’d rather organize countless little slips of paper than have real conversations. This fixation I have on “tradition” seems completely counterintuitive.

The thing is really, it’s not just the technology. At 20, I should be way too young to feel old. But I do. Most of the cashiers in my grocery store are teenagers. The ones that are my age and have been working there for awhile are almost all at school, making me feel like I barely know anyone. Coming back from England just makes it worse. I feel like the world passed me by while I was gone from Ithaca, and I’m not quite ready to jump back into the flow.

Posted on September 7th, 2004 by Lee
Filed under: Uncategorized