Just a little taste of truthiness in a factish world

I had an interesting post-factual encounter the other day. You’ve probably heard the term “post-factual” recently. After all, we just came through a whole slew of the most fact-challenged election campaigns in history.

It’s also sometimes called “post-truth,” which was named the 2016 Word of the Year by the Oxford Dictionaries. It refers to the age we now find ourselves in, an age in which “objective facts are less influential than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

In other words, “My mind is made up — don’t try to confuse me with facts.”

My post-factual encounter happened at the bank on a Saturday morning. When I walked in, a friendly young man met me and asked, “How can we help you today?”

We?

I looked around at the hollow bank, with a half-dozen teller stations (all empty) and several little glassed-in offices (all empty) before I noticed that there were indeed two other employees working quietly at desks. Otherwise the bank was deserted. No other employees, no other customers.

I told him I wanted to do a couple things—deposit a few checks, withdraw a little money from my account — and he pointed to a machine that could do all that for me.

I walked up to the robot teller, inserted my bank card, and started conducting my business. But he seemed like a nice young man with nothing else to do, so I struck up a bit of conversation.

“You know,” I said, “when I was your age, a bank this size on a Saturday morning would have been filled with people — customers, and also employees to help them. Now it’s only me and you. The customers are gone because they can do most of their banking online except for a few tasks that have to be done in the bank itself. And when a customer comes into the bank to do those things, your only job is to point to the robot that can do the work. That’s dozens of bank jobs lost, and none of them went to China or anyplace else. They were eaten by technology.”

I gave him a meaningful look. “And technology is still hungry,” I said, finishing my rant.

I could have added, “And where will you be once everybody knows how to use the robot teller and the bank no longer needs a ‘step right this way’ greeter?” But he was a nice young man, and that would have been cruel. I didn’t come in to ruin anybody’s day.

A young lady working at a desk overheard my comment and she came over to join in, because whatever she was doing must have been less important (or less necessary) than whatever chat we were having. Now I had the undivided attention of two-thirds of the bank’s entire Saturday workforce.

“I overheard what you were saying,” she said, “and it’s not true.”

Excuse me?

“This branch has always had only three employees working here on a Saturday. We haven’t cut down on staff at all.”

“Well, I’m sure that’s true, as far as it goes,” I said. “But this branch was built just three years ago. I watched as they built it. But I’m not talking about comparing your branch’s staffing today to what it was three years ago. I’m talking about banking 30 or 40 years ago.”

“We’ve always had only three employees here on a Saturday,” she said again. I checked to see if she was trailing an extension cord behind her, because it was like having a discussion with a mechanical woman. Maybe technology had already gone even further than I supposed.

The young lady was maybe 24 years old, which means that her job at this new branch may have been the first job she has ever had straight out of college. And, like many 24-year-olds, she was certain that the universe blinked into existence when she was born — or maybe just when she started paying attention to it.

In any case, she had never known banks to be any different at any time in her life. And so, her “truth” was universal enough (to her) that she felt compelled to offer history lessons to anyone who said anything different. Even if the person to whom she was offering her lesson had actually been there to see it with his own eyes.

“Are you saying that a bank this size, 30 years ago, wouldn’t have been filled with customers and employees to serve them on a Saturday morning?” I asked. “Are you saying I imagined seeing that?”

“We’ve just made banking more convenient,” she said. “People like the convenience.”

“All that is true,” I said, “as far as it goes. But that’s not the point I was making. My point is that dozens of banking jobs were lost to that convenience. It’s the same at the grocery store and a hundred other places — like farms, factories and mines. And we won’t get those jobs back, because they didn’t go to China, or anywhere else. They went to technology. This bank is empty because the machines ate the jobs.”

“We have always had only three employees at this branch on a Saturday,” she said. I didn’t catch her name on her nametag, but it might have been Déjà Vu. Then she smiled and whirred back to her station to plug back in.

I left without saying anything else, because all I had to offer was facts based on first-hand personal experience, and facts are a currency with no value in a post-factual world.

I’ll miss her when that branch has only two Saturday employees a few more years from now.

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