everything is fine
At Brentwood station I saw a poster advertising some charity that invites you to ‘sponsor a brick’ to help build a home for kids with cancer. All very laudable, but what you actually got on the poster was an enormous brick with the words ‘for kids with cancer’ written on the side of it in a babyish and slightly sinister scrawl. As though you were being invited to put them out of their misery.
Had the advertisers not considered the implication, or was this actually a deliberate way of grabbing your attention? In a vaguely similar way, walking down to the station , I saw a sign in a shop window: ‘Sewing Machines Repaired: We Call On You’. It wasn’t ‘We Will Call On You’, which would have been perfect, but the ominous tone was still there. Like they’d call on you whether you like it or not. And don’t try and pretend you don’t have a sewing machine, because they won’t believe you. And they have ways of making you talk.
The reason I was at the station was that I was in Waterstone’s on Oxford Street for a couple of days, experiencing the goods-in process. Which meant standing in a windowless back room scanning books into a computer. Everyone around me seemed strangely subdued, as though my presence inhibited them. Whenever I left the room, I imagined a party starting - everyone laughing, making cocktails, breakdancing - only for a studied silence to resume on my return. Possibly this was my basic paranoia. The only really unrestrained guy there was Dennis, who took in the deliveries. He was 58, and given to speaking his mind, even, he pointed out, to the management (‘They just laugh’). At one point, I’m sure he came in and said the police had shot someone outside, but nobody really reacted to this, so maybe I was wrong. There was much more interest in the fact that he was later seen walking around holding a spoon. Crazy guy!
This was my first introduction to the Phoenix system, which is going to take over Ottakar’s. It does everything if you let it: replenish stock, tell you what to return, compose marching songs to boost morale, punish the lazy… They’ve allotted four hours for till training to each member of staff - enough time for a minor surgical procedure, you might think. Worrying. In fact, faced with it, I saw that it had its charms. I may even have fallen a little bit in love with it. Erwyn, who demonstrated the thing to me, assured me that this was perfectly normal, as he adjusted the electrodes attached to my skull…
Yes. Everything is fine.
Had the advertisers not considered the implication, or was this actually a deliberate way of grabbing your attention? In a vaguely similar way, walking down to the station , I saw a sign in a shop window: ‘Sewing Machines Repaired: We Call On You’. It wasn’t ‘We Will Call On You’, which would have been perfect, but the ominous tone was still there. Like they’d call on you whether you like it or not. And don’t try and pretend you don’t have a sewing machine, because they won’t believe you. And they have ways of making you talk.
The reason I was at the station was that I was in Waterstone’s on Oxford Street for a couple of days, experiencing the goods-in process. Which meant standing in a windowless back room scanning books into a computer. Everyone around me seemed strangely subdued, as though my presence inhibited them. Whenever I left the room, I imagined a party starting - everyone laughing, making cocktails, breakdancing - only for a studied silence to resume on my return. Possibly this was my basic paranoia. The only really unrestrained guy there was Dennis, who took in the deliveries. He was 58, and given to speaking his mind, even, he pointed out, to the management (‘They just laugh’). At one point, I’m sure he came in and said the police had shot someone outside, but nobody really reacted to this, so maybe I was wrong. There was much more interest in the fact that he was later seen walking around holding a spoon. Crazy guy!
This was my first introduction to the Phoenix system, which is going to take over Ottakar’s. It does everything if you let it: replenish stock, tell you what to return, compose marching songs to boost morale, punish the lazy… They’ve allotted four hours for till training to each member of staff - enough time for a minor surgical procedure, you might think. Worrying. In fact, faced with it, I saw that it had its charms. I may even have fallen a little bit in love with it. Erwyn, who demonstrated the thing to me, assured me that this was perfectly normal, as he adjusted the electrodes attached to my skull…
Yes. Everything is fine.
posted by martin at 10:54 AM
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