As luck would have it, he was informed after a trial period, that the expected rate of barcode success for a cashier was not less than 18 items per minute, for those that wish to keep their jobs.

Naturally, he became motivated to achieve success.

The moral of the story to this day, is, I can go to the same grocery store and repeatedly the teletype machine that scans the checks I write never quite make it through the process and the cashier after a few mutterings, picks up the check and hand codes it into the machinery.

It’s the banks fault because they use bad ink on the checks, so I’ve been told.

The two young gals on duty there , one scanning and the other packing the goods into paper shopping bags, were an impressively competent team. They got everything done about five times as fast as Stefi and I could have done, even if we worked at what we think would be our highest achievable level of amateur efficiency.

The cans, bottles, boxes, sacks of veggies, etc, all but flew through the scanner. If there was any problem with carpal syndrome, it was not apparent with the team leader at that checkout counter.

As for HW (41) doing his own shopping, why the hell not? He was fully capable of jumping out of a plane and parachuting down in some replay of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, wasn’t he? Even retirees of national note should be encouraged to do as much for themselves as they are capable of performing. Otherwise they get the idea they serve no further purpose in life. And no, I wasn’t particularly an admirer of 41; but that’s not the point.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

And yes, by the way, you still have to get the angle right these days and sometimes still get frustrated and have to fight to get the scanner to read, but it was WAY tougher back then, you had to hit the angle in exactly one correct position, you couldn’t just wave it around until it finally read it like you can now.

The point is, Poppy Bush wasn’t THAT dumb, he was just getting a demonstration of this new version of a familiar gizmo that was being rolled out in a lot of stores, and this was one of the stores to have one of the newer units coming online, and he was doing the usual politician schtick of saying something nice when someone showed him something like that.

There was also the very fair question of whether someone who’d just spent the last 8 years serving as Vice President and followed around by a Secret Service detail everywhere he went should have been expected to be doing his own casual shopping, but…

Enh, it’s politics. It was a cheap shot against him, but it worked.

(And no, I never voted for him by the way.)

As for bar codes and human individuality, I think the latter will certainly survive. But each of us will be identified by his or her own personal barcode, with its alphanumeric designations. And the time may come when people will identify as much with their barcoded numbers as I do with my social security number and even with my well-remembered US military serial number from 57 years ago.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

As the (Orthodox) bishop whose commentary I linked says, too, the fundamental tenet of the preaching is based on the assumption that there is an elite tiny core of Christians who understand the “true” message and are thus either getting special dispensation/favors in how they’re “saved” or, in some cases, are the only ones who are truly saved. It’s a form of elitism that is just plain alien to the scriptures and to the plain intent of the New Testament.

“ultra-mega-moneymakers”

There’s always cash to be made in doom and gloom predictions.

And if you can offer a solution, well, that’s the road to megabucks….

I really have a fascination for the never-ending phenomenon of people who are absolutely convinced we are in the End Times right now and Jesus (or sometimes the Space Aliens or someone else) will be arriving any moment.

FWIW, almost all Christian denominations, including the vast majority of Protestants, view that stuff with scorn. It’s really more folk religion than anything mainstream within Christianity. Although it’s very popular in some circles. In my day it was guys like Hal Lindsay, who really impressed me when I was young and impressionable and unable to look back on his huge body of really laughably wrong predictions (you’d think that his book “The 1980s, Countdown to Armageddon” would have permanently destroyed his reputation, but he’s still got a loyal fan base). These days, it appears to be ultra-mega-moneymakers Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jekins. Although they all seem to still use as their primary source and inspiration the late Cyrus Scofield, whose work, now 100 years later, is still pretty transparently the source that these false prophets rely most heavily upon in their efforts to make themselves rich duping well-meaning Christians.

Try as you might, too, you can’t generally convince some people that these guys aren’t mainstream even to Protestantism, let alone Christianity as a whole. Even Catholic and Orthodox Christians sometimes get sucked into their madness, which is why they’ve both felt the need to say something about these false teachers. But be assured, Protestants absolutely reject this theology in overwhelming numbers–indeed, many consider it non-Christian, pagan mythology dressed up in pseudo-Christian garb. I’m not quite inclined to agree with that–even nutjob Christians are still Christians–but it’s definitely way outside of what the vast majority of the world’s Christians, regardless of denomination, actually teach.

But I still can’t get enough of it. I find it endlessly entertaining, even if I feel a little sad for those sucked in by it. Sometimes, even generally pretty smart Christians, even good friends. Ah well.