Perverse Observations...
Here is a simple truth, spoken without comment: at the age of forty-three I have now been carded more times while attempting to buy cigarettes than ever I was at the age of fifteen, while attempting [and succeeding] to get rat-arsed in bars.
posted by Xenoverse at Friday, February 03, 2006
4 Comments:
But it IS more complicated. The clerks in the stores these days are required (by invisible Management) to ask for ID to sell cigarettes; they don't even look at you, and they ask you again if you come in five minutes later. They actually have to keep an electronic record which correlates sales with ID. This is facilitated by technology that didn't exist when you or I were being carded in bars. So these two situations are not at all the same. Though there is one thing similar about them: YOU. Sometimes the setting appears intact, but it has really been taken down overnight and put back up . . .
I USED to get carded - as a matter of fact, I USED to get free drinks all evening with a simple smile...
Wonder if it still works?
Nah, I 'magine not.
I've seen the clerks swiping ID rather than look at it, so I figured they keep track electronically. I still find it highly amusing and incongruous, and even flattering - it allows me to maintain the fiction that I'm looking younger and fresher now than I did all those years ago.
And Pattie? If your smile no longer works, what has become of this country?
It's a terrible situation. Clerks are no longer allowed nor trusted to use their own judgement. They have to see state issued ID. Like automatons rather than cognitive people.
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