So I’m heading out to New York City in about forty-eight hours and I realize that yeah, I’m gonna need another external hard drive before I go. When your main computer is a laptop, hard drive space will always be your biggest source of consternation. And in my case, as I find myself more and more frequently recording uncompressed audio interviews and needing to hang onto them for the long term, I’m needing progressively larger places to park such things. And with what we’ve got planned for PodCamp NYC, showing up with a nearly-full laptop just isn’t going to work. One of these days I’ll get my act together both by having a larger drive installed in my MacBook and by centralizing all my external data and backups to a Time Capsule, but that’s not going to be the case within the next two days so last night it was off to the local Wal-Mart for one last cheapo external hard drive.
Funny thing about shopping late on a Sunday night is that you’re typically one of only a handful of people in the store, which can be kind of creepy when you’re in a big box like Wal-Mart. It’s even weirder when you’re shopping for something as sophisticated as a USB hard drive, as anyone else in the store at that time of evening is more than likely walking past you with a six pack of beer and a bag of cheetos as you try to weigh the varying features between the Maxtor and the Western Digital.
I thought I might have to deal with the drive I wanted being locked inside a glass case, which considering the time of night, would probably have been a sign to head home and try again during daylight. I mean, it’s often hard enough to find someone who has a key to those cases when the store is bustling with people on a Tuesday afternoon, let alone when the place is so empty that time has stopped and the employees of the month have gone home and been replaced by the extras from the vampire chronicles.
Instead I found that the drive I wanted was fitted with an individualized anti-theft device which resembles a cross between a movie-style timebomb and one of those timers they give you at Chili’s when you’re waiting for your table. So I head to the register, buy my drive, and then smile as the cashier volunteers that she has no idea whether she is supposed to be the person to remove the timebomb – er, security device – from my shiny new hard drive. I can’t blame her. It’s probably the first time anyone in this town has ever bought an external hard drive after midnight.
She suggests I take the drive over to the huddled crew of three or four employees over by the door who might or might not be on duty, to which I hold up the drive and one of them points me on down the line to the only fully awake-looking employee in the store. She takes me back over to a console near the registers where she looks for the tool which defuses the timebomb or whatever the thing is that’s strapped onto my hard drive as if it were dynamite. While she’s working my eyes wander around the all-time-has-stopped storefront and since I’m standing just past the registers I can see them from the cashier point of view and I see that every register has a sign posted that reads “Customer cannot purchase tobacco unless they were born before 4/20/1990.”
It strikes me that these signs are in fact only good for one day, and that management must be re-printing them and replacing them at every register on a daily basis.
Which amazes me because posting a sign that simply said “Customer cannot purchase tobacco unless they were born before today’s date in 1990” would result in a sign that only had to be replaced once a year. But sadly I’m guessing they’ve already tried that and it didn’t work. Doing so would seemingly only require that each cashier be accurately aware of the current date.
It’s about this moment that the awake-looking employee manages to free my hard drive from the security device, and then it hits me: at no point did she attempt to confirm that I had actually purchased the hard drive. Didn’t ask for my receipt, wasn’t around when I was paying for it. I could have simply picked up a drive off the shelf, walked up to her at the front of the store, and asked her to unlock it. This is a trusting place, but it made me wonder if the store’s employees fully understand the point of such a device in the first place. If they’re going to remove the device without any kind of verification that I’ve actually paid for it, then there’s little use in spending the resources to install such a device in the first place. And I suspect that if I’d given up on trying to find someone to remove the thing and had instead just walked out with it after paying, they’d have just waved me on when the door alarm was triggered. That is, if that all-too-flimsy-looking security device was real in the first place.
As I was walking out I thought back to the daily-replaced signs at the registers, and couldn’t help but wonder if the entire store isn’t structured under the false assumption that its employees are significantly more competent than can be expected for the wages they’re paying. An anti-theft system is diluted by a cashier who doesn’t know whether she’s even the one who’s supposed to deactivate it and a shift supervisor who doesn’t attempt to confirm that I’ve paid for the device before deactivating it. A simple requirement that employees be aware of the current date necessitates that new signs be posted at each register every day informing them of that fact.
I’m missing something here. I can’t quite put my finger on it. The machine that is corporate retail is working under the assumption that its lowest-level employees can’t fend for themselves, and yet they still somehow miss the mark with how they go about trying to shield themselves against that face. It would seem that you can only dumb things down so much and at some point you’ve just got to trust the people you’ve hired, but I’m guessing they’ve already tried that and didn’t like the results.
Got my hard drive, though. I’ve finally succumbed to the automation of Time Machine, and so far it’s everything it’s supposed to be, making me wonder why I didn’t start using it in favor of manual backups months ago. And now that the stuff I don’t need at my fingertips has been parked elsewhere, my crowded MacBook can breathe a little easier. That is until this weekend, when I go and fill it up again with the recordings of interviews with podcasters and podsafe musicians who visit the iProng table at PodCamp NYC.
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