Monthly Archives: August 2015

Laws of Intended Consequences: Grocery Store Checkout Misery in California

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This was the scene tonight at my local Safeway as I attempted to grab a quick twelver of Becks to refill the office fridge.

In case it doesn’t look dire enough from here, here’s the scene behind me in line.

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At this point, gentle reader. you might be a bit curious as to why Californians seem to love waiting in grocery store lines so much that they don’t speed their way through the four (!)  readily open self-checkout lanes seen at the front of the first picture. Lanes so lonely for company that the checker overseeing them began touting them, carnival barker-style, while none of the doomed patrons in line could do more than grimace and sourly wait for the next available spot at the one open checker.

The answer is found in the sign posted at the front of the Checkout lane

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In a another world–in fact, the world we had just 18 months ago as it turns out–I’d have grabbed my brews, swooped through checkout in a minute or less, and be back at my office jangling my still-cold beers in a plastic bag (that cost less than a penny to make, and which easily holds my purchases together while contributing nothing at all to the inconvenience of the journey, and requiring a fraction of the energy and environmental waste of the “eco-friendly” reusable bag that  every shopper in California is practically required to hoard).

But thankfully, I was saved from this hell of convenience by our wise leaders in the State Legislature–who have Done Something about the Very Pressing Problem of… uhh… what, exactly?

Stopping underage drinking? After all, a minor could just grab a case of beer and… what? Get carded at checkout by the scowling clerk watching the lines like always once the big “Alcohol Purchase–Show ID to Checker”: signal goes off on the self-checkout?

Were underage buyers really standing in line to law-abidingly pay for their non-lawful booze at self-checkout (vs. the much more sensible action of simply shoplifting the brewskis using the now-mandatory “reusable bags” that everyone now carries–thanks to the same legislators?)

If one is overly cynical about the actual motives of this law (and I’ve found it’s very, very difficult to be even appropriately cynical where politicians are concerned), one might suspect that the actual reason for this new prohibition is to lessen the usefulness of self-checkout–which has been catching on hugely in the past few years since it offers customers a way to pay without waiting forever, and which offers store owners a way to control labor costs in an era of massive increases in mandatory minimum wages.

Perhaps it was a payoff to their friends in the grocery unions. Or a way to “Do Something” about the lack of employment brought on by their ever-increasing minimum wages that make it utterly uneconomical to hire low-skilled workers for starter jobs… like checkout clerk.

But once again, thanks legislators. Your willingness to step forward and Do Something–about plastic bags, minimum wages… and now the terrible perils of unregulated self-checkout… has made grocery shopping in California the delight it is.

What to do if your keyboard stops working after upgrading to Windows 10 on a MacBook Pro running Boot Camp

Well, this was a little vexing…

My go-to computer on the road is a MacBook Pro (Retina), which I use Apple’s Boot Camp software on to allow it to simultaneously be a bad-ass MacOS X computer and a killer Windows machine. It really is a terrific laptop.

While on a trip this week, I got a notice (on the Windows side) that Windows 10 was ready to download as a free update to the Windows 7 I had installed. Having done a flawless upgrade of my main desktop to Windows 10, I unhesitatingly clicked “Upgrade”, and an hour or so later, I was staring at the Windows 10 login screen on my newly upgraded laptop. “Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to Login” it instructed…

I pressed it. Nothing happened. Pressed it again.. three times.. a dozen times… nothing. Rebooted. Powered the machine off. Let it wait for a while. Switched to the Mac side. Switched back. (At least I knew that the keyboard was sorta-working, as it recognized the Alt/Option key for switching boot partitions). But everytime I got to the Windows login screen, I was SOL.

After my trip, I plugged in an external keyboard and it instantly got past the login screen. I installed updates to Windows 10 but when I rebooted, the same problem persisted. What the devil was going on?

Turns out, the Apple keyboard drivers that came with Boot Camp got deactivated or otherwise messed with by the upgrade, so it was unable to handle the delete key in the upper-right of the built-in keyboard (most likely treating it as backspace instead).

The workaround: To hit Command-U at the login to activate the accessibility settings and use the onscreen virtual keyboard to trigger a Ctrl-Alt-Delete.

The fix: Boot back over to the Mac side, go to the Utilities folder and launch Boot Camp assistant. Download the (sorta) latest drivers.* onto a USB thumb drive. Then boot back over to Windows, pull the virtual keyboard trick to log in, then run the setup program on the flash drive to repair the drivers. Reboot, and all is well.

Hope this helps someone!

*It actually installs drivers from 2014, but attempting to directly download the Boot Camp 5.1xxx drivers from the Apple site results in an installer that refuses to run on this machine–even though it was specifically listed among the supported machines on the Apple site).