Last night, my wife Lisa was at a private party in a D.C. hotel lobby. It was a few work friends, and a table with some catered food.
There were a couple other private parties going on in the same lobby at the same time, and a prodigal guest from a competing soirée ambled over and started filling a plate with unearned food.
At this point I should own up that I can see myself doing what that guy did. When I'm at virtually any gathering where tables are covered with food, I see the comestibles as essentially my reward for being forced to stand around making small talk with other humans. Baked puffs with stuff inside them? Don't mind if I do! Asparagus with bacon? Strange bedfellows, perhaps, but this is a brave new world we live in! A pyramid of Colby cheese cubes? I trust that no Egyptians died building this magnificent edifice! Ha ha! (Grudgingly uses cheese tongs, when my right fist would be much more efficient.)
But the fellow's next move separates him from me. A lady explained to him that the food he was plating was not for him. Really? But I'm a Republican!, he countered.
Before I even started writing this, I went through a mental list of possible ways to spin the story. It's anecdotal, of course, thus subject to both unintended embellishment and statistical irrelevance. Perhaps Democrats are just as bad, and would have been worse if Hillary had been elected. I can't imagine ever trying to justify snacking by saying out loud that I'm a Democrat, since I'm not, but maybe there are lots of Democrats that would. Hillary was elected, so I feel entitled to some of this crab-on-a-stick. It could be that some readers will simply argue that Karl Straub is a leftist, and accordingly should be assumed to be a gratuitous liar and scoundrel. I don't feel that way about the right wing columnists in the Post, or the entire staff at the National Review, all of whom I read without pleasure, hoping to learn something, but it appears that many have typecast me as a voice they'd prefer not to hear.
In other news, an article in this morning's Post reveals that robot retail clerks will soon be a reality. In the recent election process, the emergence of robots who can do the job of a human was definitively overshadowed by the myth that Muslims and Mexicans have taken all the jobs away from white people. In the photo, the robots were mostly white, which may comfort some.
If you have ever tried to find a clerk at Home Despot, or Office Crap, or a similar establishment, you may have an ambivalence about this. Every time I reluctantly enter one of those places, and I'm vainly searching for someone to answer my stupid questions, it feels like I'm trying to catch a snowflake on my tongue in July. Sometimes I'll get a peripheral glimpse of a brightly colored vest, but it's always in motion, like a shark. And if I do find an employee, they always seem to specialize in some arcane department that has nothing to do with whatever I'm there to buy. Widgets? You want a Housewares clerk. I'm in charge of Decorative Lumber.
I would guess that retail robots will be programmed to do things humans can't do, such as stand where customers can see them. According to the article, the robots will use facial recognition technology to make educated guesses about the customer's needs. Click! Buzz! Fifty-something male wandering the grocery aisles with quizzical expression. Sir, has your wife sent you on a wild goose chase for a vegetable you've never heard of? Or an esoteric ethnic spice someone mentioned on the Food Network? My robo-protocols compel me to direct you to our numbered aisle system, whereby products in a general category are shelved, with further quotidian distinctions based on country of origin, amount of fat or sugar, and length of child arms.
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