Q. What is the most embarrassing event likely to happen to the hapless
social incompetent in todays techno culture?
A: To have one's service till card electronically digested in front of
dozens of leering onlookers.
Who has not stood in front of one of these bleeping consoles, like Kirk
on the bridge of the Enterprise, only to forget your vital statistics at
the crucial moment of engagement with the Klingon vessel? Your mind goes
gaga, only to be filled with mind boggling minutiae: telephone numbers
of pubescant girlfriends of yesteryear, the combination lock of your
first ever tricycle, the year the Ottoman Turks invaded Constantinople.
Somewhere in this cerebral void, a pit akin to the toilet on a French
campsite, your number is irretrievably flushed. You might have had too
many the night before, or suffered an accidental lobotomy whilst under-
going an operation for an ingrowing toenail.
The giant C-90 tape in your head has irrevocably decided to record over
this little numerical jingle while you were in alcohol land. You return
from your travels like a knight from the crusades, only to discover your
castle sacked and your maiden headed west. Your numbers have been
crunched, eaten like plastic pate on microchip melba toast.
I believe - and I am not alone in this belief - that some evil Jezebel
inheres in these street dispensers: a Pandora's box in every precinct.
Like Cerberus, they are the eyes of the Lord of the Banking Rings; only
at their whim can we slink in under their dribbling jowls to collect a
few pence dropped from the green giant's bulging wallet.
Say you're in another town. You've ridden in on a thumb and a prayer,
masquerading as the man (or woman) with no name. But the moment you
slip your card in, He knows you're in town. "Hello, Clint, you're
overdrawn..."
Slipping your card into one of those electronic vaginas is like putting
your head into the mouth of a lion, sending Oates into the wrap-around
blizzard or posting a dispatch to the front. It's boldly going where no
bit of plastic has gone before. For a while your celluloid checkbook is
in limbo, somewhere in that incomprehensibly advanced techno galaxy,
docking in numerical intercourse. Money will only be ejaculated if you
have followed the textbook method (the microchip position).
Many technological amateurs have never plucked up the courage to send
their plastic boomerang spinning into the numerical outback, for they
have no faith in it's returning with a wad of wallabies. They are the
runts of the culture of the chip. In another world they would be
vaporised for failing to adjust.
