Fish and chips delivered to the beach? The end of the world is nearly here

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Here’s a tiny gripe. Given the big claims about artificial intelligence – so smart, apparently, that it will soon replace all of humanity – could the lady on Apple Maps learn how to pronounce the town of Scone? The way she pronounces it, the whole town should be served with jam, cream and a lovely cup of tea.

The other day, I drove from Bathurst to Scone, with the Apple lady giving me directions all the way. By the time I arrived in Scone, I’d heard the town mispronounced so many times – maybe 20 or 30 times – I became wary during any interaction with a local.

Don’t say it, don’t say it …Credit: Marcel Aucar

“How long have you lived … in this town?” I would ask. Or “What’s the best place to eat … in this particular location?” I was so convinced I’d end up saying it wrong that I was unwilling to chance my arm.

The only relief was I wasn’t driving on to Goonoo Goonoo, as that might cause a complete tech meltdown for the Apple lady and – who knows – another Optus outage.

I know a mispronouncing satnav seems a trivial issue, but here’s one of the realisations that comes with age: there is no such thing as a trivial issue. On any given day, we can find ourselves dismayed by climate change or global inequality, but also by a local council that lays a whole sporting field of new grass and then forgets to water it. Or a packet of peanuts with a label saying “may contain nuts”.

The annoyance that comes from Tony Abbott saying “climate change is crap” is curiously similar to the annoyance caused when the supermarkets and fast-food chains continually expand the use of self-checkouts and touchscreen ordering – thus removing the sort of human interaction on which our collective sanity depends. All to save themselves a few dollars.

Here’s the interesting thing: the “trivial” issues are wrapped around the “serious” issues.

In this marinade of despair, there’s a weird mix of war, Trump, shops that no longer accept cash, global inequality and traffic cones that shut off 10 kilometres of highway on which no one is working.

The things that make people miserable, in other words, can be big, small and in-between. Here’s one example. Every time I see a food delivery driver, riding through the rain, peddling hard to get up the hill, risking death for a pathetic rate of pay, I think of those who ordered the meal. My thoughts are not tender. I think: “Why don’t you cook your own blooming dinner?”

(I may say a word that’s worse than blooming.)

I do this every single time I see them. Given the number of delivery drivers on the road, I could learn Latin if I maintained an even temper and instead practised parsing verbs.

It’s also hypocritical, since I have occasionally ordered a takeaway meal. And the hard-pedalling riders are presumably happy for the work. And perhaps the person who ordered the dinner is a shift worker whose dad has just died and who couldn’t easily visit the supermarket to feed her kids because she’s in an iron lung.

So, what sort of bastard am I?

All the same, I read the other day that the food delivery riders are now delivering meals to people on the beach – people who can’t be bothered walking the three minutes from their beach towel to the fish and chip shop across the road. And the riders have to dismount, as bikes don’t work on sand, and then try to work out which of the semi-naked sunbathers has ordered the fish and chips.

At this point, I think: “This is not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.”

Besides which, I’m not entirely on the side of the delivery drivers, since they spend half their time riding on the pavements, and have never met a red light which applies to them. And they’re often riding souped-up electric bikes which are like a motorcycle, except they are regulation and number-plate free, and you never see the police stopping them to check why this “bicycle” happens to be travelling uphill at 50 km an hour.

Fish and chips, anyone?Credit: Edwina Pickles

Should I spend my daily commute shouting to the wind in this undignified way? Should I relax about even the beach deliveries, given it’s a deal between two sets of people – one happy to pay for the service, however ridiculous, the other happy to provide it?

Should I instead spend my time worrying about global inequality?

Yet here’s the interesting thing: the “trivial” issues are wrapped around the “serious” issues. The food delivery companies are part of the degrading of Australia’s long-treasured industrial relations system – a system that goes right back to the Harvester judgement of 1907 and its insistence that a worker be paid enough to support a family of five in “frugal comfort”.

It’s a judgement that expresses a valuable part of the Australian ethos, but then the internet came along and started to scrub out more than a century of industrial relations struggle and achievement.

Maybe we need to bend the digital world to some local customs. Instead of destroying Australia’s employment traditions, perhaps Silicon Valley could first learn how to pronounce “Scone”.

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