Thank you Wal-Mart

                How many of us guys have gotten used to those nagging self-service registers at Winn-Dixie, Lowes and Wal-Mart? Are we ignoring that female nagging voice just as we would our own wives at home when we ?tune them out?? I for one say I am probably one of the few husbands that still get irritated with the condescending voice that nags us to hurry up and either feed cash, credit card or urges us to speed up our scanning by repeating the same commands at more than normal intervals. Husbands you know of what I speak!

I am getting along in years myself and sometimes find myself fumbling in my wallet for the proper bank card or getting money out of a money clip and digging for small change until I find myself talking back to a mechanical female voice (just like home!).  

To be honest, I find myself talking back to answering machines at businesses that tell me the store hours even though I am calling in the middle of the workday or mechanical messages with the infamous phrase ?your call is important to us.? My question is?..if my call is important to you, why isn?t a human being on the other end? I remember years in the Pentagon with four phone lines ringing and still having to accomplish work other than answering the phone and we didn?t have answering machines then?..how on earth did some of us ever survive that era?

Back to self-serve registers?I can imagine someone 20 years my senior fumbling for change while the detached voice repeats over and over again, to insert cash or credit card. I wonder if someone could sue for these contraptions causing a heart attack. I have four years graduate education and yet this mechanical person insists that I?m too ignorant to figure out the screen prompts without verbal assistance. Of course some of the stores such as Winn-Dixie deliberately turn the sound on these machines up so that their clerks 20 feet away can hear what you are doing and whether you are ripping them off or not. This of course means that the whole store suddenly knows you are buying a laxative or feminine hygiene product.

My thanks though go to Wal-Mart in Navarre. I went through there recently, and the machines were noticeably ?silent? and yet I was still able to scan and pay for my products. Amazing! My hats off to them for this groundbreaking move towards common decency toward us men. When I thanked the clerk charged with overseeing the self-serve area, she blew it though by responding?..they are broken! Oh-well, I tried to give an ?atta-boy.?