Tis the season of heavy catalog mail, and what to my surprise should appear? An amazon.com Bed & Bath catalog!
So even as the Vermont Country Store sees the future and sets up a website, the babe born in cyberspace reaches back to its roots to take full advantage of the three people left in this world who don’t use computers but do shop via catalog rather than risk getting mauled at the malls. Which, by the way, are the next great leap of mankind due for obsolescence, unless the teenyboppers can manage to aid their survival by spending money on fries and a coke.
This stepping over each other’s boundaries was something I noticed a bit ago and was going to write about it then, but this latest spurred me on. What I had previously come across and been thoroughly irritated by was answering the telephone to have some robotic voice try to sell me something — even opened with the "hope you’re having a good day today" line in a useless attempt at personalization, since no one was there to listen as I started relating my woes, but instead talked right over me with their continued and strategically timed spiel. (So all right, I admit, if I have the time and ill humor, I respond with sarcastic expletives in the hope that there’s a tape going. After all, how will they know if I say "Yes! Yes, I want to buy whatever you’re selling NOW!")
So planes don’t replace cars, and computers don’t replace telephones, and e-mail doesn’t replace letters of written correspondence (even as the U.S. Postal Service stupidly tries to fight progress by raising its rates again come January), but instead, there seems to be a blurred line between past, present and future when it comes to reaching the consumer.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology