Self Check-in, Self Check-out

scanning the environment in Beautiful (Portugal)

I went for a property walk, ostensibly to pick up errant trash and broken glass but also I was missing daddy. Walking in nature is a bit like having a conversation with him - he was always good at noticing and pointing out interesting things - a pigeon feather, a locust shell, a crawdad hole. I especially think of dad when I see unusual birds. He had many bird feeders and the backyard was a regular bird convention - bluebirds, yellow finches, woodpeckers, hummingbirds, blue jays, robins, starlings and cardinals were frequent visitors. It was very meditative to watch them coming and going, everyone getting along except for the bluejays, which are big loud bullies.

These regular walks are paying off - for the first time in a year of walking the Secret Garden I did not find any trash. I did find a penny - an American one. My mom and sister and I have this thing, that when we most miss daddy we’ll see a penny, that’s him checking in with us. Some mythy thing my sister was told by a nun, the deceased’s way of saying all was well. I can’t say that I believe such things - obviously me or the h dropped some US change on one of our property walks. Even when a wild green parakeet flapped down to casually munch a plum above the patio, I wasn’t confident it meant anything about dad. When it comes to signs, I am like the meme I saw recently on my social media - I need a signier sign.

Still, finding the penny did make me happy. Like a past version of me, when daddy was alive, sending a message to future me that all will be well. THAT version of me, the one who dropped the penny, probably thought I’d be a lot more fluent in Portuguese by now. And I would be, if I’d stop doing what’s easy and start doing what’s necessary to improve. What’s easy is when my instructor drills my vocabulary: How do you say goosebumps? kill? blood? (we talk about horror movies). Arrepios, matar, sangue I say with confidence, because I know those words.

What I don’t always know is the difference between I will eat (comerei) and I would have eaten (comeria), and sometimes I get mixed up conjugating the verbs ver, vir, ser, and ter. So I outed myself and told my instructor what words fill me with confusion or dread when I hear or must speak them. Make it hard on me, I told him and he agreed, grinning with enthusiasm. I tell myself I’ll be glad when I can just say He went to Lisbon for a few hours (ele foi a Lisboa durante algumas horas) instead of working around the blank spots in my fluency with tortured sentences like He is not here. He is in Lisbon now, he comes back later. (Ele nao e a casa, ele e na Lisboa agora, volta mais tarde). All because I can’t remember how to say “went”. Recognizing a word on a gamefied language app is a whole lot different from being able to retrieve that same word in the heat of a conversation.

It’s not the only time I take actions that evade building fluency. The grocery store we frequent in Belas Portugal - a small town halfway between Lisbon and Sintra - has self-checkout. Because we usually carry our groceries a mile home in backpacks, we can’t buy a whole lot, and self-checkout is always both self-limiting and faster so that’s what we do.

Or anyway that’s what we do NOW - but it hasn’t always been the case. When we first moved here, and started going to this grocery store we checked out normal, with cashiers who scanned each item etc. That, however, involved talking. Not a lot - but some. You have to say your NIF and your Continente card code for the discount and respond if you’ll be needing bags or not (Nao preciso um saco, ‘brigada). It seems simple but I was (and still am) always thrown by the fact that when they ask for your NIF they never ever pronounce the word/acronym NIF. A stream of words comes out and they stare at you and you say, hesitantly… NIF? And they say Sim…? And you give your NIF. Or not. We always do. If there is a reason not to I don’t know it yet.

When we saw self-checkout was available we tacitly agreed that it was preferable to get the task done without having to communicate, if possible. We were both much more shy of our Portuguese back then, and self-checkout removes the obstacle of mentally having to translate speech - you can choose Portuguese, Spanish, or English spoken by a strangely urgent-sounding woman.

It seemed like a great solution until I met my nemesis, the produce weighing station that spits out the scannable code.

If you’re checking out the usual way, the cashier weighs and scans your veggies for you, but if you are in self-checkout, this is something you must do for yourself. Easier said than done. So much so that I fully and freely admit that for awhile I purchased vegetables already packaged up with a UPC code already affixed - no pesky weighing station needed. I know it was the coward’s way out by I rationalized that we were already hogging a self-checkout machine for more than twice as long as the average customer who wasn’t shopping for the week but the day. We’re like swiss architects as we scan and pack that corral - heavy bulky items first, light/fragile items like eggs and chips last, and never wait til the very end for stuff like packets of spices - groaning under the jenga of a week’s worth of groceries, a packet of provencal herbs may not register when you place it gingerly on the pyramid.

Wait for attendant, the robotic voice from the self checkout kiosk says.

The voice is vaguely authoritarian - you imagine her wearing something with epaulets - with an intriguing though indeterminant accent. If I ever heard that voice in a crowd, I’d go bananas. It would be weird to take a selfie or get an autograph from a woman known by her voice (I wonder if irl the woman who owns Siri’s voice is constantly confronted with people saying You seem so familiar…?). I could have her autograph my journal, Please wait for the attendant! along with her name which I hope she signs with extreme curlicues and flourishes.

The familiarity of her voice reminds me of the familiar voices of automated telephony of my youth, like MovieFone, the Weather Channel and 411 Information. Sure the internet is amazing but at one time the US had more than 420,000 Information phone operators. You used to be able to dial 411 and an actual woman (not a phone tree recording) would pick up the line and say by way of greeting “Information.” And you’d ask a question, and they’d look it up for you and give you the answer. Like, what is the telephone number of the Hilton Hotel in Franklin Tennessee, or Do you have a listing for Misty Merryweather in Houston Texas? To which she might answer, I’m getting 80 listings just in Houston, can you narrow that at all? Do you have a middle initial? And you could say, well, it’s either Misty A. Merryweather or Misty M. Merryweather. I don’t remember which but I’m almost sure of it. And she’d say well that gets us down to eight, do you have a pen? And she’d READ THEM TO YOU and WAIT FOR YOU TO JOT THEM DOWN and even patiently correct you if you read them back to her wrong. And if it was only one number she’d say, Can I connect you? Which cost like, an extra nickel on your phone bill or something.

I looked it up to see if I was remembering it right and while there are less than 50,000 operators now, it turns out that Information still gets 71 million calls annually. I only ever dialed 411 while I was in middle school - I never had to ask permission to call Information, and I felt so important after I dialed the last number, waiting for the connection and playing with the cigarette butts stuffed in the ashtray mom kept by the phone for her marathon calls with Aunt Dorothy.

The MovieFone voice was a guy whose bright yet deep-timbered voice sounded about as natural to the caller as the word Fone looks to the reader. It was a voice that sounded like a fake tan, like it belonged to a guy who went to LA with dreams of being a star but the closest he got was a nonspeaking role in a toilet paper commercial and this MovieFone gig. He read those movie summaries like he was letting you in on a joke.

During the period we had no refrigerator nor washer and dryer we were making the trip to the grocery store daily, as we could shop for food, do laundry, have breakfast, and even visit the vet - four birds with one early morning stone. (the Portuguese word for early morning is madrugada, which sounds like the title for a great horror flick, The Madrugada). After a couple of seasons of this, whoever happened to be working the self checkout register wouldn’t even come over to assess the nature of our difficulty, they would just give us a friendly wave and unjam the scanner from their magic customer service register.

Once, I accidentally held a pack of mushrooms while the unjamming of the scanner occurred, then the whole transaction was wrapped up and the h started bagging and I said What about these? He said, Put them in the bag, we already paid. But I was pretty sure we hadn’t, and at home I checked the receipt and sure enough, no mushrooms. It’s bothered me ever since; I half expect when I go to buy the yellow chair they will say That’s 179 euro with 10% off for our storewide sale, so 162 euro….but now we have to charge you for those mushrooms you swiped in November 2023 and of course there’s a fine so that comes to….179 euro please.

It may surprise you to learn self-checkout is not as fool proof as it seems. Once when I went to weigh a cauliflower I received the mysterious information that there was no produce in the store called cauliflower. I used my phone to look up the translation; a man stepped up to use the machine so I stepped aside. When I saw he was weighing cauliflower I edged up behind him to watch over his shoulder as he used the keyboard to enter cauliflower, only to have the machine say there was no produce in the store spelled with a cau. I silently exulted.

Ajude-me, he calls and the attendant comes over and types couve cauliflower and a picture of a head of cauliflower appears on the screen. Ha, I tell the h. He’s Portuguese and even HE doesn’t know the word for what he wants to eat!

Several times I’ve weighed oranges only to have the machine ask me what type of oranges, and I always pick the wrong one whilst sometimes muttering Orange oranges, asshole. There are usually four or five types of oranges to select from on the monitor. Thankfully there are only two types of bananas - Madeira and something called, mysteriously, Category One, so I felt pretty confident weighing bananas but come to find out the machine offered only Biologic so I chose that and the robotic voice said in an unnecessarily loud voice There is a problem, please wait for the attendant.

There was one variety of purple grapes to purchase in the produce aisle - this will be a cinch, I thought. But at the produce weighing machine there were four types of purple grapes programmed in. I was pretty sure I picked the right one but when the h scanned them he said Oh my god. Immediately the robotic lady said (very loud) Please wait for the attendant!

Didn’t you look at the price? the h asked. He showed me the slip of paper the produce scale had spit out, which showed 717 euro.

The next time we bought grapes the same thing happened - I chose ALL the varieties and each time the price spit out was hundreds of euro. Ok, YOU WIN, I say to the machine. Com licensa, I say to one of the customer service types, a young man who speaks perfect English. Sure I will help you, he says with perfect youthful assurance he can solve the technology problems of anyone over 30. I smile as he punches in some numbers and confidently hands me (without looking at it) the sticker the machine spits out, which reads 989 euro. I point at the price and his face goes white. Oh that is terribly, terribly wrong, he says. I know! I say, and I’m sure he wondered why I sounded so pleased.