Face to face: why places will continue to exist

It is not just that I dislike filling in forms. Worse than that, I am very bad at it. Which makes it nearly impossible for me to buy things on the internet. Last night I tried to buy some tickets for a comedy show. All I had to do was fill in about twenty boxes with what was required, and every time I tried, something went wrong, and when I went back to where I might or might not have made the mistake, that page disappeared. So I tried again and this time it said that I could not order twice as many tickets all in a row as I actually wanted. So, I gave up. This morning I tried again, and now the thing said that I cannot buy tickets even in the number that I do want. Last night I think what the original problem was was that I failed to tell them that London is in the UK, although that could be quite wrong. Maybe London is not in the UK. Maybe London is in England. Or Great Britain. Who knows with websites? So, now, I and my friends will not be going.

This is the secret reason for why shops still exist. Secret, because explaining this fact means admitting that you, like millions of other sensible people, are repeatedly confused beyond endurance by allegedly user-friendly but actually use-effing-impossible, interactive (i.e. you have to do it all) websites. You can go to a shop, see it, and if you can’t do all the things they say you must do with your credit card or your address or whatever the hell details they want, they have to explain what you must do before they can sell you anything. All a computer does is repeat whatever gibberish it was that you did not understand in its tortuous entirety the first time around.

This is why banks still exist, instead of all inhabiting cyberspace. The banks all want, physically speaking, to shut themselves. But the people in them know that if they do not explain things face-to-face to actual people from time to time, they will lose out to more obliging competitors. This is why people love their Post Offices. One of the most useful services that Post Offices supply is the service of filling in forms for you. There is a wonderful tax office at the bottom of Euston Tower where you can take your tax forms, and where they tell you face-to-face if you have got everything right. Everything. And when the guy behind the desk whose facial minutiae you can actually scrutinise says that all is now okay, it is. (Apart from the fact that they have stolen thousands of pounds from you and will now do nothing with about half of it and harm with about the other half. Those are different arguments.)

This is, more generally, the reason why places – villages, towns, cities – still matter. This is why London exists.

This is also why live theatrical performances exist and will continue to exist. I recall reading somewhere that the Marx Brothers beta-tested all their movies by first taking them on the road to show to live audiences, to find out which bits really were funny. The very gadgets – computers linked together by wires, the internet etc. – are time and again the things that only face-to-face contact can sort out for you. For as long as progress is being made in the storing, processing and transmitting of information, which basically means for as long as there is any progress at all, then for that long will physical places still be necessary for each new arrangement to be explained, face-to-face, until the procedure (a) actually does work properly, and (b) until it becomes as familiar to a sufficiency of people as using a telephone or reading a blog now is for me, or as writing for a blog is becoming.

That sufficiency of people can then explain it to the remainder (me), again, face-to-face, as and when they convince me that I really need whatever it is. Often they do. But often they fail, through, for instance, not getting the difference between doing something with no fuss once every few minutes (easy) or hours (quite easy), and doing something with no fuss every few weeks (very hard) or few months or years (impossible).

Speaking of telephones, those much hated call centres are really only hated because they are so often used to aggress and interrupt, to the point where they now threaten the efficiency of the phone system as a whole by making some vitally important real calls sound as if they are also fake interruptions. But I find that, when call centres are used to put me in touch with a living, breathing, knowledgeable and helpful human being – even if I cannot smell his breath or tell what country he is speaking from – they can be invaluable. Like the telephone itself, call centres are often an excellent compromise between total face-to-face-ness and total mechanical moronitude. Assuming, that is, that I do not have to convince a user-hostile computer system to let me talk to a human in the first place.

But, ask yourself this: why are call centres call centres?

When computers work – which they mostly do when I blog, for instance – then yes, I can do miraculous things at a miraculous distance. But I would never have had a hope of getting into computers in general, or blogging in particular, if I had not had friends and shop assistants who had showed it to me, with them sitting right next to me, explaining it, homing in on the bits that matter and reassuring me about things that looked as if they mattered hugely but actually do not.

Please do not misunderstand this posting as an attack on the whole idea of progress. I love progress and would be lost without it. I am just trying to describe an important part of what it actually is and how it is actually achieved.

PS: Just to be sure that I still could not make work the theatrical ticket system that I have here denounced, I tried yet again, just before posting this, and of course this time it did work and my friends and I will now be going after all. Typical. (London is in “UK”, by the way. I guessed that right.)