Watching older people struggle to use the McDonald’s kiosk genuinely makes me sad. It’s ever increasingly clear that technology literacy courses provided on a state level as a public service are necessary to assist people with the rapidly changing technology landscape. Society changes fast and rather than abandoning people to individualized solutions we need a socialized response to helping people adjust.
I went to get bloodwork done a few weeks ago and they had one physical receptionist and three kiosks. I reflexively went to the human receptionist but she wouldn't speak to me and directed me to the kiosks. So I went over to a kiosk and tried signing in but it needed my health card to be inserted into the machine. My insurance provider has switched to fully digital cards so I couldn't insert it into the machine. The machine tells me theres a scanner on the bottom that it can scan cards with. It wants me to rest my phone on the scanner. It fails to scan my card 3 times. On the fourth time the little stand to hold your phone literally falls off the machine. Eventually I get it to scan my card. I wait for two fucking hours in the cramped little waiting room with like 30 other people and I give up my seat to an elderly man with a cane because there were only four chairs in the waiting room. The singular human receptionist is only processing people every like 10 minutes. So even though I got there when they opened at 6am I didn't get called to her desk to confirm my paperwork until 7:45am and I didn't get my blood drawn until 8:30 am and I was subsequently late for my 9 am lecture because I still needed to drive to school. All of that to find out I have a severe vitamin D deficiency. It was hard enough for me to navigate. I couldn't imagine being elderly or disabled or speaking a language other than english, spanish, or chinese (which were the only languages the kiosks offered). The kiosks were way too high for a wheelchair user to reach on their own and were filled with small print that someone with vision impairments would struggle to read. Never mind the fact that the the whole thing was slow and poorly laid out. But yeah God forbid they hire a second and third human receptionist then maybe they would process people faster than a sloth. The whole system is designed to make you miserable and hopeless and waste time.
