Another New-Fangled Invention or: the Demise of Youth, Math and all that is Holy

Thank you, peeps, for sharing your amazement at the scanners at Macy’s. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one who buys shoes while also picking up milk or diapers, at vast self-service shoe places or at consignment shops! And if Alicia hasn’t seen them, then my guess is that they haven’t been out very long at all.

Anyway, yesterday there was another “invention”/application of an age old invention that cuaght me off guard. We went to one of those arcade/playland places when our plans to go the museum were thwarted by the 50,000 other people who had the same idea. MAM had a ball in the ball pits (not thinking about germs, not thinking about germs, not thinking about germs…) and eventually we bought some tokens to play skee ball and what not.

When we were done, MAM was ready for a prize or two, and so I counted our tickets and steered her toward the proper display case. You know the one–the one with the plastic balls, snakes, coin purses and yo-yo’s. We were no wherer near the number of tickets needed for anything plush or inflatable, but she was happy with a Koosh-like thingy and a sucker.

On to the Demise of Youth, Math and all that is Holy.
When we reach the counter, I handed my tickets to the kind teen behind the counter and ordered a pink Koosh and a red sucker. He looked at me and said, “Oh, did you already count your tickets or something?”
(Why yes Sparky, yes I did. How could I know what prizes we could get if I didn’t count my ever-loving tickets? I mean, really.)

He then proceeded to place our tickets on a scale. A scale that weighed in tickets. So my ticket collection “weighed” 105–just enough for a koosh and a sucker. Talk about bringing automated/mindlessness to a whole new level.

The kid was shockedt that I had handed him the right number of tickets for my pre-count order.
What can I say? I’m advanced like that.

3 Replies to “Another New-Fangled Invention or: the Demise of Youth, Math and all that is Holy”

  1. WHA?????????

    It’s a sad and crazy world out there, I tell you!

    By the way, you missed nothing at the museum. My friend took the day off for it, and said they stayed 2 hours; left because since they hadn’t paid, they didn’t feel the need to stay and get their money’s worth; and it was so crowded that they didn’t get to interact at the Lego exhibit.

    She will NOT be going back on any of their free days! In fact, she said she may never go back on a weekend, again, either!

  2. Yeah, all the places around here have been doing the ticket-weighing thing for a while now. There is one place where you feed your tickets into a counting machine and it spits out a slip with the # of tickets which you then use to redeem your prize, but most places just do the weighing thing.

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