#barcode
catastrophic-writer-deactivated:
Story Time:
Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:
This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.
And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?
She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.
I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.
Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.
At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.
I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.
“What… did you do?”
“Igenuinely. Have literally.No. Idea.”
She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.
My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”
And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.
TDLR; Library Card Charged $4,000 of Garlic Bread.
that’s just how valuable library cards are. each one is worth at least $4000 of garlic bread
A picture is worth a thousand words, a library card is worth $4000 worth of garlic bread, if we can figure out how many words the average library card can check out at once, we can probably work out a picture-to-garlic bread conversion here, too.
Professor Ed Hawkins’ data visualisation, Warming Stripes!
It started at Hay Literary Festival. Professor Ed Hawkins was trying to find a way to communicate climate change to an audience that might not be able to interpret scientific graphics or data.
Those stripes — shades of red and blue representing hot and cold temperatures — chart temperature changes from 1850 to 2018, running from left to right. They look like a bar code, albeit a vibrant one with a serious message. Hawkins, a professor of climate science at the University of Reading, says that the impact was immediately obvious.
That data visualisation was based on local temperatures for the festival’s location in rural Wales. Since the 2018 festival, Hawkins has worked on a graphic for global temperatures. Most recently, it took centre stage at a very different festival: as the backdrop for Enter Shikari’s set at Reading.
On 21 June 2019, the summer solstice, he launched a website where users can view and download climate stripes for the cities they live in, from Vienna to Verona. So far there have been more than a million downloads.
Warming Stripes from 1850-2020 for GLOBE / Europe / Asia / North America.
Courtesy: https://showyourstripes.info/ & designweek.co.uk/
Post link
The barcode was invented in 1949 by Bernard Silver. While barcodes were invented with grocery stores in mind, it wasn’t until 1974 that they started appearing on consumer products. The first food to have a barcode? Wrigley’s Chewing Gum!
(Image credit: The Guardian,Wikipedia.)
Post link
The Barcoders
Musical project featuring an ensemble including Ei Wada performs music using barcode readers and, well, barcodes …
Performing at Maker Faire Tokyo 2018, above is a video compilation of examples shared on Twitter profile h.tanaka (have a look to see better quality video examples)
If you like this kind of project, you may like this video profile of Ei Wada put together by toco toco tv here
New BarCode Singlet - Ready for the gym
