Bookshop

Over the Festering Season I received some National Book Tokens, which were pretty cool, as I obviously read a lot, and all that jazz.

Spending them, on the other hand, was a bloody nightmare. Although it did help to remind me why I normally buy books online instead.

First of all, the local bookshop. It’s an Ottakars – not brilliant, but not bad, and (for the moment anyway) at least it’s fairly independent, and not part of a huge chain. (although they may end up being taken over by HMV.) Their stocks are OK, but not brilliant.

I’d taken in a list of books I was thinking of buying. Could I find any of ’em? Could I chuff. Not one. And when I asked the staff, I got told “Oh no, we’d have to special order that – it’ll be at least two weeks”. Useless. I did end up getting a couple of books, which amounted to £12.98, and paid with the £15 of tokens. Great, no problem at all.

Or not. Turns out that Ottakars won’t offer change (i.e. actual coins) for book tokens – they give you the difference back in yet more tokens. Great, 2 £1 tokens. They’ll go towards something useful, I’m sure. Of ocurse, it would’ve also helped if they’d actually had any £1 tokens in the tills, too. Instead they had to a) get a supervisor, b) get the supervisor to go back to the office to get the tokens, and c) wait for them to come back to the till. All in all that took about ten minutes.

So yes, overall, I can’t really see me being converted back to bookshops from Amazon, if that’s indicative of how it all works…

Ikea

Well, we did end up at Ikea in Brent Park last night – and all told, it wasn’t too bad. Amazing, I know – I wouldn’t say it was good, as the blue and yellow monstrosity still seems to act as a magnet for all the braindead fuckmonkeys in North London, but at the same time nor was it awful. Which makes a change.

I’m never going to like the place – but at least Ikea seem to be finally doing something about the more heinous cock-ups at the store – the car-park has been redesigned, they’re making a new entrance to the place , and they’ve eliminated the awful blockade that was the area for collecting purchases.

Of course, the ordering process is still nightmarish, and the customer services doesn’t deserve the title. But the stuff’s good quality (in general) and popular. I just wish that the customers had brains that stayed active…

Touchscreen

I wonder how long it’ll be before some bright spark figures out how to use a touchscreen to scan for fingerprints at the same time.

That way when you’re using an ATM to get money, and touch the screen to say what amount you want, or what options you want at the time, the screen could scan your fingerprint on the button, and lo, instant ID verification without having to twat about with PIN numbers, cameras, fingerprint scanners or anything.

Seems like a good idea to me, but I assume there must be some kind of technical problem with it. Otherwise surely someone would’ve done it already, right?