I’m at granddaughter Lorelei’s baseball game; her third game on this sunny Sunday. The game is going long, so I head for the restrooms. This particular sports complex includes an indoor sports facility with actual restrooms and not just a couple of porta potties. As I approach the entry door of the building I quickly check out the food truck nearby. Maybe I’ll get something to take back for Becky and me.
I leave the building and pause at the food truck menu. Various fried things, various cold things, salty snacks, big pickles. On closer inspection, I realize they don’t want my money. Or rather, they don’t want my cash. But not only do they not want my cash, they don’t want any of the several plastic rectangle stand-ins for cash that reside in my wallet. To get that big pickle, it seems, I must use an app on my phone: Apple Pay, Google Pay, Zelle, Venmo, or others in the panoply of money apps most of which I’ve only vaguely heard of and none of which I have ever downloaded. And I won’t, I vow, until I am forced to by The World, The Man, Big Tech, The Bankspiracy, or by the simple frustration of not being able to buy food from a baseball field food truck.
I briefly considered asking the next customer who walks up if he or she would buy something for me with his or her app and then I would pay him or her with cash, but that seemed a bit bold and might possibly be misinterpreted as threatening. I also wondered if I could barter some of the home-grown spring peas we have in the car, but figured it would be kind of hard to establish a value on which both the vendor and I could agree. Besides, how would they account for that in their electronic ledger books?
Oh, well. “Nothing looks that interesting to me anyway,” I say in my best, Fox-and-Sour-Grapes voice.
I know I tend to resist most forms of new technology. It’s like “they” want me to live in a world of their design, and I‘ve always thought of myself as fiercely independent. But as Rachel, Lorelei’s mom, reminds me, I don’t resist all new technology. I admit to using the Starbucks app on my phone to pay for coffee. I confess I listen to music, read email, check the weather, take photos, track my running stats, and get directions all from apps on my device, that magical gadget in my pocket I still refer to as my “phone.”
And I realize I use several musical appliances which operate in the mystical realm of new technology: Bluetooth speakers, wireless earbuds, wireless foot switches for my guitar. (Ha. I just typed “foot witches” which maybe is not too far off the mark.)
Maybe part of my resistance, my hesitation to commit to banking apps, has to do with the idea of exchanging my cash via the Internet. I grew up being very watchful of my money. The thought of sending funds to some virtual someplace in the air is a bit unnerving to a guy who grew up thinking financial security was in cash only.
But, really, money is just something we all agreed upon as a medium of exchange. I just read a piece about a German woman at the end of World War II who failed to exchange her pre-war Reichsmarks for post-war Deutschmarks and lost all her savings. Reichsmarks were no longer an accepted medium of exchange. Money is a gamble based on trust, I suppose. And, really, money itself is sort of an illusion.
So it is probably inevitable I will download an app I can trust and start paying for more things with my phone, er, my device. Maybe at the next game, I’ll get a big pickle.
Norman Knight, a retired Clark-Pleasant Middle School teacher, writes this weekly column for the Daily Journal. Send comments to [email protected].
