Automating ourselves out of jobs

BIGGEST PET PEEVE EVER. I don’t know how many of you use Bank of America, but they have this new policy where when you enter the place some employee comes up to you and gets in your face and asks if you need help. If you say no, they persist. “Try using our automated machine sir, it posts the transactions same day!” What I don’t understand is how someone can be so eager to put himself/herself out of work? Don’t they realize that by teaching me how to scan in my check and deposit cash that they will have no reason to be there anymore? When their boss told them that part of their job was training the customer to go to a machine to do the same shit they do, do you think they ever thought six months in advance? And if so why didn’t they question their boss?

Haven’t they been to a CVS or a Shaw’s or a Home Depot lately? Remember when stores were busy like 15 years ago and there would be about 20 chatty tellers at the grocery store and every single register would have a line 5 deep? Those were people’s jobs! Kids used to be able to get work sacking groceries…now we carry out our own after checking ourselves out. Even when I go to the post office some 70-year-old-gray-haired dinosaur asks me if I need help learning how to use the Automated Postal Center.

First of all I doubt this dude even has wireless internet or a cell phone that isn’t the Jitterbug. He is just doing his best to keep kissing his boss’s ass because that is the generation he is from, but he is speeding up his retirement 10-fold because not only can I check myself out at the post office in record time, I am showing all the current employees’ superiors how truly slow and dead they really are. Here’s the problem we are entering. We are going to have a few high paying jobs for those who are qualified. We are going to have an army of computers and robots doing jobs that people used to do. And then we are going to have millions of people on government assistance until those who run this place decide it isn’t worth it. Sounds apocalyptic I know, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Just like you should pay a little bit more for American made goods, maybe you can wait a little longer in line for a human, or call the store and explain why you hate dealing with machines that many times complicate simple tasks. But most of us are too lazy, or too cheap to change our ways which is why I am going to start stockpiling canned goods and bullets. And my guns will be the automatic ones…