Beyond Comprehension

[This is a backdated post]

I want to start this post with a general spiel about what people consider normal, or refer to an article I've read recently, or any of the usual intros that these things often kick off with but this time I honestly can't.

What I'm starting with is this: my 21 year old cousin does not know how to cut her own fingernails.

Yes, you read that correctly.

I've always known she was sheltered, a bit lazy, and that her parents do more for her than they should* but this was the first time that I truly grasped the magnitude of the issue.

We were at a family gathering and halfway through she realised that she had netball afterwards and had to trim her fingernails first or she wouldn't be allowed on the court.

She didn't have anything useful with her so she started biting them off.

Seeing what she was up to, I pulled out a basic set of nail clippers that I keep in my handbag and passed them over.

These sort of dealies, you know the ones.

She thanked me, put them over the end of her nail without opening them and then proceeded to swivel them about, trying to get them to work like a man unsure of how to apply a can opener to a can in a way that will produce food.

Starting to get a bit worried now, I said 'oh here let me get that' and popped them open for her and demonstrated the clipping motion.

She thanked me again, applied the clippers to her fingernail, clamped down and then instead of clipping through, ripped the end of her nail off, then calmly applied it to her next fingernail to do the same.

At this point I think my brain started screaming, and a nail later I managed to get my body to move, plucked them out of her grip and said 'let me tidy those up for you'** and cut her nails for her because Jesus Electric Sliding Christ!

How do you get to 21 without learning how to cut your own nails?

This means that someone else has been doing it for 21 years!

Outside of the times she's presumably gnawed them off.

And if she hasn't learned how to trim her own nails what else hasn't she learned?

There have been a lot of articles written about helicopter parenting*** in the last decade particularly.

Articles about how helicopter parenting is leaving adults stuck in adolescence because overly helpful parents have sought to protect them from disappointment too effectively or have not been able to step back and allow them to learn from their own mistakes.

Articles about how parents are pushing their children into learning environments or professions that make them miserable in the belief that they're setting them up for success later in life which will counterbalance today's misery with future happiness and security.

One of the most extreme manifestations of this inability to deal with 'the real world' or life in general comes in the form of Japan's Hikikomori, individuals so overcome by the pressure to succeed or the fear of social missteps that they lock themselves in their rooms, barely emerging for years.

This of course the extreme but it all has to start somewhere.

Wanting your child to be successful, to achieve their potential, is an admirable goal but it has to be seen within the context of a full life.

Kids also have to be taught how to manage their time, to cook, to take care of themselves, and to balance priorities.

This means introducing chores, encouraging them to manage their own responsibilities during childhood and letting them experience the consequences of failing.

I know my parents bailed me out more than a few times when I panicked about having left an assignment until the last minute or accidentally left it at home and begged for someone to run it to me at school during lunch time so I wouldn't get in trouble.

They also let me fall on my face sometimes so that I realised that I'm the person who needed to remember to do my homework because no-one else was going to do it for me.

My Dad wouldn't give me the answers, he would ask me questions until I started forming my own.

It was a balance that did see me wide-eyed and more than a little nervous at the idea of failing academically but in a position where I could - after having a bit of a panic - manage to talk myself down and through what I needed to get done.

I'm still a bit prone to doing things at the last minute because I know I'm smart enough to get away with it in certain situations but I've also come up against enough situations where being smart doesn't cut it because the task required time and effort to be put into it that couldn't be papered over with a good vocabulary.

But I learned this through trial and error, sometimes having to run smack bang into consequences multiple times before the lesson stuck.

Without encountering natural low-risk failures during their younger years, kids can't possibly get a realistic view of what failure means and how to cope with it or overcome it as they get older.

Every prospective failure will be seen as terrifying.

And you will end up with someone who can't cook, doesn't clean up after themselves, drops out of multiple university courses and can't cut their own fingernails.

Because good lord, there is an age at which children should be put in charge of their own personal grooming and it is a lot younger than twenty-friggin'-one!



*She's been diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder in the last 4 years so now the waiting on her is more of a 'keep an eye on her so she doesn't hurt herself' thing rather than anything else but I can't help but think that if they had given her more rules to follow and boundaries to respect that 'none', she would have been in a better place to deal with her mental illness.

**I know I should have shown her how to use them properly and returned them to her but by this stage I just couldn't bear the idea of her doing something else outlandish. I did point out that if you squeeze them firmly they cut right through and I had shown her how to open them and close them but I'm guessing the lesson won't have stuck.

***See, this is where I would have started this post if I could have stopped my brain wailing 'Her nails! Can't even cut her own nails!'

Why Do People Think National Service Is A Magic Cure?

[This is a backdated post]

No, really?

Every now and then there is a rash of posts that get shared on social media claiming something along the lines of 'if everyone on the dole* had to do a year of mandatory service in the military it would sort this country out'.

No.

It wouldn't.


There are some people who aren't physically or mentally suited to being in the military, even a watered down version of the military.

Outside of that here are some other reasons this a terrible idea.

• The military does not want a whole bunch of unmotivated, resentful people being pushed into their training program and bloating out their structure.The military devotes time and effort to providing physical training, medical care, education and a career path to their members.
  If you suddenly add the entire able-bodied, age-appropriate chunk of Australia's unemployed to that equation you are going to have to pull military members from their career and from deployments in order to have enough instructors.
  You are going to have to build more barracks and devote more money to training facilities, medical care, educational materials and food.
  I can guarantee you that all that shit will cost more than providing the dole and while it may temporarily stimulate the economy it is not necessarily going to 'pay for itself' through its end product.
  This is because... 
  
• Joining the military does not mean that you automatically become an ambitious, organised, self-starter who gets up and at 'em.
  I have worked as a civilian amongst military personnel.
  There are plenty of people who are lazy, incompetent, bad at their job and happy to be shuffled from posting to posting as fate dictates because they love other people making decisions for them. These people aren't interested in serving their country or being efficient or even being pleasant to be around, they are a bunch of see you next tuesdays who like passing the buck and being paid regularly.
  There are also plenty of upwardly mobile, intelligent and decent people but for the most part they were that way before they entered the military, entering the military does not guarantee this as an outcome. And you have to keep in mind...
  
• There are some people who should not be trained to handle weapons, organise the movement of materiel, or have a good grasp of tactics.Because when you set them loose on the world after you've filled their heads with all this useful information they will use it to be as dodgy as shit.
  Some people will use a year or so of national service to turn their lives around, others have no interest in turning so much as turbo-charging their current behaviour.

So if you have a mandatory system that still has to exclude people who don't meet the physical requirements or pass the mental assessments what do you do with these people?

Since you're red hot on making people earn their way but not that interested in building work programs or job accessibility for people with mental or physical challenges in their lives?

The Australian rate of unemployment was about 6% last I remember hearing.

What percentage of that percentage would be suitable for even token military service?

How much would that cost?

How much would it benefit these people and the economy as a whole after they've finished?

Some people may very well decide to go career military or stay in until they had more training that would see them qualified and well set up to get a job on civvy street.

Others would be getting out of there as fast as they could.

Mandatory National Service isn't a magic pill that will cure our societal ills, I have no idea why people keep insisting it is.



*Slang term for Australia's unemployment/welfare payments system.

Sedentary Society?

I was reading an article which says that Australians are becoming less and less likely to move interstate for school or work or anything really.

It was one of those things that was both surprising and unsurprising.

My family is one of the ones that has moved for work before.

I was born in Melbourne, my family relocated to Canberra before I was 1, stayed there until I was about 8 (long enough for my brother and sister to be be born in the same place), and then moved to Coffs Harbour. We stayed there long enough for me to finish primary school, then moved back to Victoria in time for me to start high school.

And there we stayed.
I got to complete high school in one place, my sister got to attend both primary school and high school in one place, while my brother finished primary school and then went through high school without another shift.

Each of the moves had been prompted by my father's job, when new positions or promotions became available.

There was a point when I was in high school where we might have moved to Tasmania but Dad either didn't apply for the position or didn't get it.
At the time I was glad because I was a stubborn teenager who wanted to stay with my friends.
Now I'm kinda wondering what life would have been like if we'd made that move as well.

The thing is my father had a job in the public service.Even before the advent of the internet they had a pretty good listing of jobs that was available internally so you knew what was available.
I assume you either interviewed locally and a report was passed on or you were interviewed by phone back when that was the only sensible option*.

And THAT is the point my brain got all hooked up on initially when I read the article.

'How the shit are you supposed to get a job in another state?' I thought.

'Are you going to bung along your resumes, then go on some kind of interview roadtrip?'

'What kind of employers are going to be comfortable hiring someone who isn't local?'

'What if you get there and you don't like the town?'

These are all thoughts that, as a person who has friends who interview for jobs in other countries and then bugger off overseas when they get them, I was a bit surprised to find myself having.

If they could do it back when all job postings were by newspaper and employment agency then obviously they can do it now, we just don't.
Maybe because there is a part of our brains that is still rattling along, unobserved by the conscious mind, still thinking this shit.

'How the shit are you supposed to get a job in another state?'
Search for jobs in your field online and apply for them, durr.

'Are you going to bung along your resumes, then go on some kind of interview roadtrip?'
Well what with these magical advances in technology, any employer willing to hire someone from out of state would be willing to interview you by ye olde phone or videoconference over Skype or Viber or another similar program.

'What kind of employers are going to be comfortable hiring someone who isn't local?'
Well some employers would be fine with it, others wouldn't.
A lot of government organisations, chain businesses, or big companies that have offices in more than one city would think of it as business as usual. If you have the qualifications and are willing to relocate, then you're a good candidate.
Some towns or cities that need more people from various trades, or more medical professionals and the like, hold information events to attract anyone qualified to do the work and willing to up stumps.
There are some employers who wouldn't consider it but they would for the most part be smaller businesses or in industries that have a certain kind of turn over.
You wouldn't expect to apply for a cafe job on the other side of the country and have the owner excited to Skype you for a casual position.

'What if you get there and you don't like the town?'
I am very aware this is a question you ask yourself when you've never been in proper economic difficulty.
You've never had your back to the wall and been looking down the barrel of 'do I pay the rent or do I buy groceries?'
If there is work available locally and you're just a bit bored and looking for a change you may not be that thrilled about the idea of moving to a town/city/state you've never visited before and decide against the idea.
If the shit is heading for the fan and you've got a chance at this distant job I expect you take it and worry about whether your prospective new home has a bowling alley or a place of worship of your choice later.
There are people who move purely because they want to experience life in different places, to get more experience.
There are also people who move wherever they need to in order to support themselves and their families.
If you've got the luxury to be in the first category then good for you.
If you're in the second category you probably find this whole discussion a bit frivolous.
If you're partway between the two... good for you, you're probably very level-headed and making the best out of your opportunities.

This topic has been in the public eye recently with Prime Minister Abbott answering questions on the lack of work available for young Tasmanians and what this will mean with harsher welfare benefit criteria by saying “If people have to move for work, that’s not the worst outcome in the world … for hundreds and hundreds of years people have been moving in order to better their life,”.

At the time this comment was met with outrage which I joined in with in a vague sort of way, waving my fist at the car radio and muttering imprecations, but now I can see that most of that anger came from a possibly subconscious reaction of 'what if they don't want to?' or 'why should they have to?' the answers to which in previous generations would have been, respectively, 'tough titties' and 'because they want to eat'.


It's amazing that in a time of faster travel and easier communication in many ways we are becoming more rooted to our physical locations.

It's hard to believe it could be a fear of the unknown, seeing as so much more information is available to us these days, but are we coming less adventurous as a result?

Have we decided that being able to see things virtually rules out the old saying 'if you never ever go, you'll never ever know'?

Or maybe, like me, everyone is thinking of moving about as something they'll do 'later' but because we never apply any proper thought to it, later doesn't come and all of a sudden we'll be in that age bracket who are less inclined to move at all.


Whatever the reason it'll be interesting to see how trends develop in the future.

The Russian Bride

I went to a party on the 31st of May and I am still in shock.

Not because the party went off like something you read about in the papers and tut tut when they talk about it on the radio.

The party was for a friend's birthday and she decided to have a 1950s theme so we all turned up dressed appropriately, faces and hair gussied up, made cocktails, ate edible versions of tragic 1950s party nibbles and enjoyed some period appropriate music until everyone got drunk enough to put on Amon Amarth, Puscifer, Tool and Korpiklaani.

The thing that shocked me is that one of her friends who had casually mentioned he'd be bringing a guest, turned up with a lovely young girl who essentially seems to be a Russian mail order bride.

He had told literally no-one that she existed.

He hadn't said he'd met anyone online, that someone was moving in with him or that he had suddenly turned into the kind of guy who tells his friends that his girlfriend* isn't allowed to drink because he's told her she's driving...

He's closer to 40 than not, she looks like she's around 20 and speaks English with hesitation.

She didn't seem cowed or shy exactly but she wasn't actively engaging in conversation, rather responding when asked and content to stand around and observe otherwise.

He didn't hover over her like a hawk all night but him swanning off to talk to other people and leaving THE GIRL NOBODY KNEW EXISTED who doesn't speak very good English with a bunch of loud, tipsy strangers isn't much better behaviour.

I had actually seen him down the supermarket with her once a couple of months before, said G'day in passing, gotten a Hello back from him and a smile from her and wandered on thinking 'I guess he's got a girlfriend?'
If it hadn't have been for that encounter absolutely nobody would have any idea how long she'd been in the country.
And that's just when I saw her.
For all we know she's been here since his last visit to Russia** and he just hasn't seen fit to mention it.
The last visit to Russia that we know about was late last year, in case you were wondering.
What if she's been here this whole time?
Just... sitting about his house...

The thing is he's always been shit at sharing news.
You find out he's due to have knee surgery a week or two before it happens because he makes a throw away comment about taking time off work.
You find out he's going overseas because he says something about a VISA.
But moving a human being from one country to another and possibly having to sponsor them legally?
And moving them to a shitty country town with nothing going on, and not introducing them to your friends*** so she possibly has no social circle?

The friend whose party it was thinks he said she's over here teaching Russian but I don't know where or to whom or even if this is an accurate recollection as the problem with 1950s cocktails is that the party started at 6pm and everyone was stinko by 8:30pm.
Luckily they slowed down, eased off to lighter mix drinks and didn't wreck themselves but there were a lot of lapsed memories that evening.

It is a very weird situation to find yourself in.

He was acting as if nothing was wrong but getting a bit stubborn if anyone asked him why he wouldn't let her drink.
Her English is functional but not very complex and if he's the only person she knows, she mightn't be willing to risk getting him offside if we start asking her if she's OK or happy.

Maybe they're having a perfectly good time together, it's hard to say, but the situation seems creepy.

So I guess now we know she exists we'll have to try and work out what the hell is going on, who she is to him and make sure he's treating her right.

I can imagine wanting to start a life in a new country and being willing to shack up with somebody to make it happen but moving to a small town in central Victoria and spending most of your time in the house of a man who barely talks doesn't seem like a great reward for your bravery.
Better than actual abuse - which we don't think is going on - but yeah, not the cream of the crop of promised lands.

He's always been a bit NQR in some social situations but even people who have known him since high school are stunned.

And so now we're questioning everything we know about him.

So now that we know those who know him best are going to try and get the two of them to come to more days/nights out, get to know her better and ask him what precisely the deal is before we all die of curiosity or start stalking them around the place to make sure she's OK.

Because she's a total sweetie and we would throw him over in an instant if we thought he was treating her badly.



*We assume, for all we know they're married...

**He's been two or three times and had never really said much about the trips even when pressed and now we're worried we know why.

***Or family? We have no idea if he's told his family...

Wait, How Do You... Everything?

From the things I post you would probably think I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the collapse of society.

I don't really, it's just very interesting, much more interesting than the complex and ultimately impractical structures and devices I design when I'm bored.

Anyway, the collapse of society!

So, society has collapsed!

The EMP has knocked out all our technology or the zombies have sent us into a panic or a disease has wiped out 70% of the Earth's population or I guess aliens?

The point is shit has gotten real.
No-one is manning the power stations.
The chain of supply has been interrupted.
We're on our own.

Shit!
OK!
No!
Keep calm!
Right!
What first!?
We have to be smart about this!

Shelter!
Water!
Food!
Medicine!
Clothes!
Furniture!

I guess loot it?

No!
Shit!
Everyone else is looting it!
And even if we do manage to loot it, it'll eventually run out!
Crap!
OK, uh...

How do you grow your own food?
How do you preserve that food?
How do you make your own materials?
How do you make your own clothes?
How do you build your own house? One that doesn't rely on all the shit we don't have any more to function properly!
How do you source safe drinking water?
Does anyone know how to make penicillin?

Nope.

And there's no electricity because the zombies ate all the power plant dudes or the tech is all fried because of the EMP aliens, so we can't check the internet.

TO THE LIBRARY!

Fuck!
Everyone else got here first!
Some people cleared out all the reference books and some people wanted to burn the fiction section to stay warm in winter and then there was a big fuck off battle between the cultureless weenies and the booklovers!
Crap!

If only I had compiled a survival library before this happened!
Survival for Dummies!

Wait!
Society hasn't collapsed yet!
It's not too late to squirrel away a reference library of helpful instructional tomes to keep you and yours alive in the challenging years to come!

Look!

OK, they probably don't have 'How to make Penicillin for Dummies' but that's where you have to branch out and get books like this!

I grabbed me up a copy of this recently and while I haven't actually got it behind glass, it is sitting there calmly reassuring me that I will have some idea of what to do should the world as we know it end*.

And while I can't say that I am putting together a 'How to Everything for Dummies' library with assorted references and instructional texts, I can't promise you I'm not.

Also this is why we should make sure that local government doesn't shut down our libraries.
We'll need them when the shit hits the fan.
But we probably shouldn't mention the zombies in our letters to our local members of parliament... People get weird about stuff like that.



*Realistically I know what I would do is panic and die or get gathered up into some hey-feudalism-so-great-let's-try-that-again! warlord's harem or something.

What's In A Name?

One of my friends got married last year and much to my surprise, she changed her name.

She's a fairly independent person, her family is very important to her and after her father died she made a big point of commemorating their shared history.

As a result, I was not expecting her to be the kind of person who would giddily start referring to herself as 'Mrs [My Husband's Name]'.

Now another friend in our circle is engaged and is planning to change her name as well.

I have trouble wrapping my brain around the whole thing.

My name is... my name.

It's part of who I am.

I've never really thought about getting rid of it and the fact that other people are so comfortable with doing so confuses me.

I know it's traditional and a lot of people say it's 'easier' but still, unless I was marrying someone with a super awesome surname like Wartooth* I don't think I could do it. And even then I think it would be an addition and not a substitution.

There are all sorts of arguments that usually get trotted out at this point about "If you hyphenate your surnames then what is the next generation supposed to do? How long do you want these names to get?"
At least two women I know who are in long term de facto relationships that have produced children have kept their own surnames** but all their children share surnames with the fathers, not their mothers.

Though it may be unfair, to me that sort of thing always smacks of appeasement.

"Of course they're your children! See? They have your surname!"

"Look! We have children together and they have your surname! They're like little yous! Please don't leave us..."

"I know how you like to own things and now it's like you have your own franchise..."

What with DNA testing it's no longer necessary to use surnames to denote who put what into whom and what the result was and having the kids share the father's surname alone really feels like a matter of possession.

If the children shared the mother's surname alone it would also feel a bit odd as the children are no more just a product of their mother than they are just a product of their father***.

If a same-sex couple get married and adopt a child or give birth to a child, people would acknowledge that a decision would have to be reached that was acceptable to both spouses/parents****. Why do people find it so hard to apply this recognition of individual identity to hetero couples?

There has to be some kind of sensible solution. Or even multiple sensible solutions.

I know stepping away from the 'tradition' means having to think a bit harder about things and have - what might be for some couples - some rather involved and fraught discussions but there are plenty of options:

• both keeping your own names with no alterations
  
• one or both of you adding an extra surname either in front of or behind your own
• adopting a shared hyphenated surname
• making a composite surname from components of both or your originals surnames
  
• making up a badass new surname that has nothing in common with either of your previous surnames

If you choose to take your spouse's name because your own family was an abusive or neglectful train wreck and you want nothing more to do with the name, go nuts.

If your parents named you something cruel and unusual that turns your full name into a little sentence that has made your life hell, I can definitely understand you wanting to change your name*****.

But don't change it just because your spouse's parents/grandparents/family biographer will crack the shits if you don't or because you're worried about people looking at you askance.

We don't accept bullying as acceptable when it comes to partaking in or abstaining from controlled substances, engaging in sexual acts or whether or not to become a parent; why should it be allowed or seen as appropriate when it comes to something as important as your identity?

Catherine Deveny wrote several newspaper articles and a blog post on this topic and when I brought the subject up at work I was actually rather shocked at how conservative most of my female coworkers were, either believing that a woman should change her name 'just because' or using the 'it's just easier' explanation that has Catherine knocking her head against the wall.

I'm sure some people like the idea of changing their name and as long as they're doing it for reasons that they're happy with then that's their choice and right but the whole practice will always weird me out a bit.



*That was just an example, I'm not really thinking about marrying a fictional cartoon character. Toki and I would be totally incompatible.

**It was three but one of the women mentioned got married, took her husband's name and now has the same surname as her children.

***I also know some men are a little paranoid about their likelihood of getting custody or visitation rights after a marital/relationship split and that this option would only exacerbate that anxiety.

****Well, those people who accept the validity of same-sex relationships and/or the existence of same-sex sexual attraction...

*****In any of these circumstances, you could have changed it by deed poll of course but a lot of people don't seem to consider that.

Knot What You're Used To

When it was first explained to me that I wasn't going to be growing a big old beard when I grew up I was incredibly put out.

Beards looked cool.

If you got sick of them you could slim them down into all sorts of moustache configurations.

If you stuck with it you could end up with face fuzz long enough to braid.

None of the female landscaping I found out about later seemed anywhere near as versatile or interesting.

And God help you if you suggested to young Ricochet that shoes, clothes or accessories were on the same level as something you could grow yourself for free and use to disguise yourself when you were on the run from the law.

I've never had peener envy or any of the other associated psychological complexes but I did feel ripped off about beards.

Also ties.

I remember being in primary school and having a friend explain to me with all the confidence of an eight year old that girls get to wear ties as part of their uniform until they finish high school but then after that they don't get to wear ties any more.

That also seemed stupid and unfair.

Ties can look business-like and impressive or you can loosen them at the end of the day to indicate 'THAT'S IT! I'M DONE!'

You can knot them around your forehead if you're going into battle, use them to choke people in exciting urban combat situations, use them to tie things when a length of cord-like material is needed for survival, wear them to work I guess...

And I took my friend's word for it.

You didn't see many ladies on TV wearing ties in office dramas or cop shows; it was all open necked shirts and discreet blouses or tough, no-nonsense, ballsy long-sleeve numbers.

After a while I forgot about it.

Then when I was in university and going through my pretentious stage*, I went into a particularly mismatched kitschy looking cafe and the girl who brought me my giant latte was wearing a tie.

She wasn't just wearing the tie, she was rocking the tie.

Short sleeve button up shirt with ragged sleeves, knee length black skirt, distressed stockings, lovely scuffed berry coloured boots and a tie.

A tie!

Just hangin' there, as natural as can be.

I had a jealous.

And then I had a revelation!

If she could do it, then I could damn well do it!

When I went home I dug out my old school tie, stared at it blankly for a bit and tried to remember how it worked**, flopped it over my neck and then after a few false starts made it look not like a turkey barfing up its own head.

And I never looked back.

I may never grow a truly awesome beard but I will enjoy every minute I'm flaunting a tie.

Because some things are just fun for no particular reason and those are the ones you should make a point to enjoy for themselves in all their unexplained glory.

Even if there was an explanation how could it be better than plain old 'I just feel damn fancy'?



*Well, entering my pretentious stage, I've never really left.

**My memory is very efficient at clearing out anything it deems no longer necessary. If I changed my phone number today I can almost guarantee you that it would be gone in less than a month from the meat storage slot it currently occupies in my long-term memory.

Beep!

One of the supermarkets near my flat has just installed a bank of those self-service checkouts.
After some in-the-field research and speculation I have decided that I don't like them.

Sure they have some good points, shy people are more likely to buy condoms, pregnancy tests or items of a personal nature; you can pack your own groceries and don't have to stop the checkout kid from putting tins of food on top of your bread or carton of eggs; and they take up less space and help speed up the tempo of the store so you can get in and out quicker but the bad points seem to outweigh the good.

Firstly, without the perceived judgement of the checkout clerk or other shoppers in the queue certain folk may be far more likely to make food purchases that are bad for them which they know they shouldn't be making but can't quite reign in their impulse control enough to reject. I speak from experience :-b

Secondly, the more of these self-service checkouts they install, the less actual staff they have to employ and train and now is not the time to be phasing people out.

And the biggie, thirdly, for some people the supermarket checkout represents the sum total of their regular social interaction.
Public transport ticketing systems are automated, you can buy almost anything online and certain lines of work don't require any verbal communication at all* so this may have been their only moment of mandatory small-talk and the more they're able to avoid it the more difficult it will become and the less likely they'll engage in it voluntarily.

This probably sounds a little 'back in my day' or 'you're taking this too seriously technophobe' but I do think it's a factor.
Some people will always be social and tactile and interactive no matter how many virtual options are available and some people will always struggle in those situations but the less practise they get the more likely they are to withdraw.

I'm not saying people should be forced into situations they're uncomfortable with but without a little push and a bit of chance I might not have found out about or become involved with a lot of the parts of my life and the close friends I really value now and I would hate to have missed out on that.

And that's why I think self-service checkouts are The Matrix.
Thank you.
Wait, what?


*And of course some people don't work