London is a fast paced city. That’s not even a metaphor. People on the streets tend to speed walk furiously. People are like mad of being outside. Curiously there are certain streets where the walking average speed is even higher. Maybe pubs, restaurants and nearby public transport should warn you at the door: “Careful, you are incorporating to a 9km/h street”. Because you can’t just get out and walk from 0. You need to incorporate with some impulse already. Like starting a car in third gear. You need to go out with momentum unto the wild street pathways.
Other unbearable moment I experienced recently was one morning in the middle of a station when you are walking to change lines and suddenly you find yourself in the side of the escalators where people actually climb them. People on the right tend to just chill and let electrical energy actually do the hard work. But people even rush it on the left side and that’s a lot of commitment and hard work if you didn’t signed up for it. Being forced to actually climb in shame is one of those horrible modern moments. How to best avoid this? That’s a hard question because sometimes you simply found yourself on the wrong side of the escalator. There’s no easy answer. Just be aware.
One other somewhat odd situation is when you go to a fast food restaurant with a self checkout. Or anything really. Because I am very easily influenced. So I tend to just want whatever there’s an ad at the door. Or some times the user interfaces on the machines have amazing offerings. But once you start the process of buying food that image is long gone. With human beings at the very least I can make it awkward and force them to think what is it that I want that is printed in the door ad. Some times this works, sometimes is just a “oh sorry, that’s gone from the menu since April”. The best user experience I would think would be that you could just tap the ads and pictures around the store and pay for your order. Like amazon fresh but interactive.
Self-checkouts are a different kind of modern torture. Usually reminding me how useless I am and whenever I have to manually enter a fruit or a vegetable, jesus christ. Always gets me reconsidering if I should just stick to eat things with barcodes. And that’s the main reason for my terrible diet. How to avoid this? You could always order online but then things get a bit more complex because then calendars are involved. It requires a time slot commitment at home to receive your groceries. And that’s when I tend to be at my worst. Just cozily covered watching my life pass by TV or Youtube. And the emotional energy required to open up the door and process groceries is way worse that simply being shitty at checking out stuff as a cashier.
So no solution at all to any of the proposed problematics. If this was anything more useless this would already be the script of a primetime TV show. As usual, thank you for reading.