During middle school, I spent fıve weeks one summer memorizing the QWERTY keyboard. Throughout my more than two decades of writing articles, that summer of typing lessons was a source of pride. I felt superior to the hunt-and-peck types who had to look down at the keyboard to form sentences.
Now, kids today are all thumbs, literally. They use their thumbs to rapidly send text messages, rarely having to complete a word before it pops up as a logical choice. Yet there I am, unable to rest my fıngertips on a human-sized QWERTY keyboard and having to look at my display.
While at CSP’s FARE conference earlier this summer, I felt a similar theft. I found myself listening to panelists talk about the potential obliteration of c-store registers. Phone makers are putting POS devices in consumers’ hands for hundreds of dollars, said Noah Glass, founder and CEO of Olo, a New York-based food-ordering platform for digital devices. Also, he said, working to integrate with POS manufacturers has been diffıcult because they see the technology as disruptive. That’s true in part, but as I learned from a college-foodservice retailer, a lot of legacy technology is tied to kitchen-prep systems and must remain part of the ordering process. That must be addressed fırst.
Still, I stew with uncertainty. Like many others, I see my powers fading into irrelevance I fly into the sunset on the juice I have left? Or should I wrap these scrawny thumbs around that Acme dynamite plunger and shift my weight forward?
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