I’m riding back from somewhere I didn’t want to go with my wife, by a route I wouldn’t have chosen, and now I learn we have to make a stop for fuel when I’d rather just go home and hide from quotidian reality. Preferably in a good book. Or even a bad book.
No such luck. Since she is driving, it falls to me to get out and pump. Having offered the machine a credit card, it demands my zip code which seems like none of its business. Finally, it generously deigns to permit me to pick up the nozzle and pump my own overpriced gas.
Peace at last. But no. The gas pump starts talking to me. I look around at it and it’s looking back. It has a TV screen where a news twinkie from Bloomberg is telling me sales of light tricks are up. Did I ask for this update?
At least it isn’t hectoring me to buy other ancillary items. At a beach gas station we frequent, a PA system in the pump, apparently on an infinite loop yammers at the customer making a gas purchase. It exhorts you to get an oil change, to take advantage of their deals on lube jobs, beef jerky, tobacco products and alcoholic beverages.
This hard sell may work on some members of the pump-bound, captive audience who are stunned to realize that the hole in their heart can be filled with Slim Jims, but it just makes me want to cut my fill-up short at $1.37 and cross the street to a station where the only gas is ethyl, not the hot air of a pitchman pump.
Clearly these new wave gas pumps must work or the company wouldn’t have gone to the expense of installing them and wouldn’t be subjecting customers to their assaults. But they just put my teeth on edge and raise my hackles.
I can easily imagining getting a tire iron out of the trunk and trying to beat the pump into silence. The security footage of this would undoubtedly end up going viral on You Tube making me not just a felon but an overnight sensation. In a cruel irony, my pump-rage video would probably wind up playing on gas pump screens at stations across the country.
Once a living human being at a gas station filled your car for you, checked your oil, water and tire pressure and gave you green stamps. The attendant might even say a friendly word. Then gassing up became do-in-yourself, but at least you could be alone with your thoughts, if any, while getting high on the fumes. Then they started piping in Muzak so you wouldn’t have to endure a second of silence. The rest is history, which was famously defined by Joyce as a nightmare from which he was trying to awake.
Now, of course, the pump is just one more place that is no longer safe from the unwanted mechanical chat that drones away night and day. You can’t walk through a store without a soundtrack. You can’t take a plane ride without your unwanted TV friends burbling in the background and competing with unintelligible terror alerts and announcements concerning gate changes and delayed flights.
At doctors’ offices wall-mounted TVs nag you about your diet or tell you to exercise or try to up-sell you some additional service while you wait, in a miasma of germs, to see how long you have left to live. Some waiting rooms even make a political or class statement by keeping the TV tuned eternally to Fox News or the stock ticker. Physician, heal thy waiting room.
And now the gas pump is also giving me news I don’t care about, or pitching me products I would never ever buy. One motive may simply be to distract me from the whirling dials that show the speed at which a torrent of dollars is leaving my pocket and being transferred to the account of the oil company. But it isn’t working. I see the pennies cascading by.
Probably, however, the real reason I now have to endure a TV chirping at me when I buy gas, wait for medical care, prepare to board a plane, walk down a street, attend a ballgame is because research has shown modern man can’t bear to be alone in blessed silence.
Into media we are born and out of media we die. In fact, videos now play a part in many funerals. We walk through nature in earphones, deaf to the birdsong, and drive while staring into little screens. We are constantly plugged into something that is subjecting us to a voice — whispering, yelling, wheedling, cajoling, nagging in our ears. God forbid that your office, store, neighborhood or backyard should be free for a single nanosecond of the incessant drone of infotainment.
We were warned that in 1984 Big Brother would be watching us. Now, in 2015, Big Brother, Little Sister, Peppy Weather-girl, Reliable Anchorman, Happy Huckster are talking at us from the moment we open our eyes in the morning until the moment when we fall exhausted into a fitful sleep. Even then, in our dreams, we are pursued by talk-talk-talking heads. Shut up, we scream. But they never do. It’s a nightmare.