Technology” where will it end”

 I hear that supermarkets are thinking of doing away with staffed checkouts, and replacing them with automatic checkouts where a machine checks everything for you.

What happened to the good old days when you could ask a member of staff about the products, or just have a general chat. I think this is going to hit the elderly, the less abled or people with mental health issues, who possibly need someone to talk to when they get stuck and need support, either in finding or paying for something.

I find that this is yet another obstacle in the way of these people, as we already have a push to have contactless payments everywhere, yet many elderly and people with disabilities may not carry or want to carry credit cards, either because of the problems remembering key codes, or they simply feel unable to use them.

We also have doctors stopping people from seeing them, because they want everything to be done online or on web-chats, like zoom etc, yet here again a lot of people struggle to use computer technology, and how do you explain personal problems over a computer.

 I had an experience of this recently, when my wife was worried about a lump which started to grow on my back during the first lockdown. When she rang the doctors surgery, they sent a link and my wife to photograph the lump and send it back to the doctors via this link. Needless to say it did not work, and after trying a few times, we just gave up and my wife rang up to explain that she is not into technology and could not get it to work.

After this we were given an appoint to to see a nurse practitioner who started the process going. I confess that some of these nurse practitioners are better than some of today’s doctors, but that’s life.

On top of this we are no longer allowed to ask for repeat prescriptions, you are supposed to do this in line yet again, although you can go to your doctors and put the repeat into a letter box to get processed.

I find all of this technology is going over the top, as it’s going too fast, and many of us cannot cope. 

It feels as if we are having everything done by robots these days and it’s becoming frightening for me, but there  are others who may find this too much.

 Is this another form of discrimination, I do wonder, because it’s causing more and more confusion to those of us with memory issues