Have you ever driven by a fast food restaurant and the sign says something like “Now hiring, text ‘food’ to 12345 to apply?” I have and never thought about it more than that until a man showed up at the library earlier this week, panicked because his buddy was trying to get him a job at Wendy’s and had said all he had to do was text “food 12345” but he didn’t know how to do that. He told me, with the unselfconsciousness shared by many ex-convicts that I’ve met, that he was recently out after a twenty-seven-year stint in federal prison and stupid when it came to technology.

After first figuring out that he needed to text “food” to 12345 and not just “food 12345,” we were guided through a set of multiple choice questions (press 1 to apply for crew member, 2 for shift manager, that sort of thing). By the time we’d answered all of them, he’d gotten an interview for the following day at the local restaurant. Being fairly familiar with a variety of hiring technologies as a consequence of my career, I was expecting the whole process to be a lot harder than it was, but I still don’t think this particular patron would’ve been able to apply without help. You’re not born knowing how to talk to a chatbot, and the “hiring assistant” we were interacting with could only figure out a limited set of responses.

“Why don’t these people just get jobs?” is a question that a person who’s thought about it for more than five minutes shouldn’t be asking, but most people don’t have to think about it for more than five minutes. We all know that applying for jobs is annoying and involves jumping through hoops, but imagine trying to go through those same processes when you haven’t held a cell phone since 1997 and literally do not know how to use a computer mouse.

The cynic in me—who is, let’s be honest, eighty percent of me—thinks it’s on purpose. If you’ve never learned the skills needed to navigate Walmart’s oblique online hiring process (and don’t have the help necessary to mitigate that), the odds are pretty good that that’s because you grew up poor or don’t have regular internet access or are elderly or have been incarcerated for a significant period of time—in other words, you belong to a class that that company isn’t interested in hiring from but doesn’t want to appear to be prejudiced toward. If the website is so frustrating that you give up on applying, you haven’t been discriminated against; that’s a personal failure.

This sort of obfuscation (intentional or otherwise) isn’t just limited to the hiring sphere. Recently, a man came to our library because Walmart (I promise this isn’t a hit piece, they just come up a lot when it comes to this sort of thing) couldn’t cash the money order that they had sold him—at some point between purchasing the order and cashing it, the receipt had been folded in half. Since the crease happened to be covering one of the numbers that the machine needs to read the order, it couldn’t. The store, for reasons that I’m sure make sense somewhere in the bowels of corporate bureaucracy, couldn’t reprint the receipt or offer him a refund; he needed to leave and go to the website of the company that Walmart contracts with for their money orders to resolve the situation.

Please imagine that you’ve never been taught how to use a computer, or at least not well—you don’t know how to tell if something online is an ad and don’t have access to the phone that Gmail is sending your two-factor authentication code to. No one’s ever told you whether you type the URL into the bar at the top of the page or the search bar in the middle (you don’t know what a “URL” is). The $300 you’ve got stuck in this money order will break you if you can’t get it out of limbo by Friday and the official channels you’ve been given to resolve the problem are fully web-based. Making matters worse is that the link listed on the money order with “go here for a refund” doesn’t take you directly to the refunds page and once you get to the site that page is not well marked. (What’s that, cynic Annaka? You think that the company made it hard to find intentionally? Perish the thought.)

It took us, me and him, about forty-five minutes to figure out how to request a refund and I have no way of knowing if he ever got it. Maybe this isn’t surprising; everyone has had a tech support call that lasts for over an hour, but there’s something about the fact that this man had to rely on the dubious customer support skills of a person who barely knew what a money order was half an hour ago (that’s me, hi) to resolve an issue with a product he bought at the largest retail organization in the country that just feels wrong. (While you’re at it, Walmart, fix your hiring portal.)

Everyone does everything online these days, except for the people who don’t or can’t. And while I believe that’s a good thing on balance (if I could only get the brokerage who oversees my 401(k) to stop sending me paper statements every month, I’d be the happiest woman alive), the people that are left behind by the relentlessness of how online everything is are usually the ones who can least afford to be. And when companies don’t provide the most basic assistance to the tech illiterate among us, those people are left to rely on social safety nets (family members, the library, charity organizations) that may or may not be able to help them, assuming that they have access to those things in the first place.

It might be cheaper not to give some without tech skills a chance. It might be cheaper not to provide adequate support to your most disadvantaged customers. Making value judgements based on whether or not someone types with two fingers might be expedient, but it’s not the kind of society I want to live in. Unfortunately, it’s the one we’ve got.

2 Comments

  1. Jesse

    It is a terrifying thought to imagine how someone like me (who only survives technology by the grace of God and the University of YouTube) will be able to function 20 years from now in the high-tech savvy world we are careening ever so swiftly towards.

    Reply
  2. Alex Johnson

    This post makes me feel less ridiculous teaching basic tech skills to fourteen year olds

    Reply

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