I'll pay you to read my mind!

[muckefuck]

As some of you may know (from its tedious recurrence in this journal), one of my pet peeves with the local food service personnel is their failure to learn my preferences despite my repeat business. I would think this rather an unreasonable expectation given how little I pay and how little they make were it not for the number of past employees who mastered this. Dobrina has probably served me more sandwiches at this point than Andrés, but he quickly learned never to put tomatoes on my food and she still hasn't. Raquel serves me food at least once a week and, every time, she asks me the exact same battery of questions. (Today she asked me for the umpteenth time if I wanted fries and I almost blurted out "NUNCA!") Gerardo served me the same sandwich three times in two weeks and knew by the third time that I didn't want any iceberg or cheese on it.

The point of this post isn't to lionise some employees and denigrate others. Lunch today got me thinking of how much I appreciate such service and--inevitable given the universal commoditisation of desire in this modern world--what kind of a premium I would be willing to pay for it. Would I accept a markup of, say, 2%-5% the price of a sandwich in order never again to have say "No tomatoes!" In a heartbeat. But how could you accomplish this?

I thought back to a post that_dang_otter wrote about trying to hitch a ride and how much easier this would've been if local truckers could only access information about him remotely. The technology--wireless internet, GPS, social networking sites--is all already in place. It's simply a matter of getting it to work together and to convince people it's worth doing--even if it might mean paying a fee.

Same for my tomato problem. All that's needed is some means of recognising me as an individual (swipe card, auto-detection of my cell phone, etc.), some means of correlating this with stored data, and some means of displaying this data for the food service workers. In theory, I spend ten seconds once in my lifetime inputting "No raw tomatoes" and it's part of my order forever.

I suppose a cynical response to this would be that it would dehumanise the entire experience even further. I can't take that seriously. How does my being forced to mumble "No tomatoes!" enrich the exchange in any way? In fact, I find it dehumanising because it means I'm being treated as just another interchangeable customer instead of being recognised as a individual client with distinct preferences, even after hundreds of interactions.