Gizmos and Concentration: The Odd Couple
July 8, 2010
So I am in a convenient store near Harrods’s Creek. There are two people in line in front of me. One of my neighbors is paying the stupidity tax by snagging a fist full of lottery chances. The other person in full yuppie boating regalia is buying a 24 can carton of beer from the giant beer cooler. I have a lousy bottle of chocolate milk. The clerk. A high school junior. Tomorrow’s leader here today.
The clerk is talking on the phone, yapping at motorists trying to get the 1950 vintage gasoline pumps to work, thumbing through the mind boggling number of lottery tickets, and casting furtive glances at the front door. Robbers who dropped out of grade school think that Harrods Creek convenient stores have bags of cash ready to hand out on demand.
The clerk gave the person paying the stupidity tax the wrong tickets. The guy with the beer put the carton on the floor and left. I stood there waiting with exact change. I have no idea if the guy beating the gas pump with the nozzle was trying to get the pump to work or venting rage because the clerk did not turn on the pump. When my turn came, the guy clerk did not interrupt his conversation, took my $1.45, and turned his attention to the water running in the sink. It was overflowing.
Get the picture. One convenient store guy unable to do one thing at a time and do one thing correctly.
Too much anecdote and not enough data. Point your browser at “Excessive ‘Screen Time’ Said to Affect Children’s Attention Span: Report.” Here is a keeper of a finding:
Researcher Edward Swing, a graduate student at Iowa State University, along with his colleagues assessed 1,323 children in the third, fourth and fifth grades over a 13-month time period. Swing said: “Those who exceeded the AAP recommendation were about 1.6 times to 2.2 times more likely to have greater than average attention problems.” What’s interesting is the study also included a one-time survey of 210 college students. The middle school students, he reported, were a slightly less likely than the college students to have attention problems.
Maybe the real life experiences on a college campus are different from what I witness everyday. It is good to know that the future convenient clerks will exemplify unfocused behavior. Is that not special? No wonder search systems are giving online users what the numerical recipes determine the user wants. Hey, it’s fast and correct because it is from a computer. For sure – UX.
Stephen E Arnold, July 8, 2010
Freebie
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