Every Kind of Craft

There is a saying that to err is human, but to make a proper foul-up of things requires a computer.

My favourite supermarket is very much proof of this. For those who don’t know it, it’s called Ocado and it is online only; while other supermarkets do allow you to order online these days and will deliver, Ocado is the only one that doesn’t have physical shops. Therefore, because they’re relying completely on their website for sales, it has to be extremely good… and it is. I’ve looked at the competition and have found nobody else with a website that is so well organised, nor, indeed, anywhere else with such a good choice of products. They are particularly good if you have any kind of special dietary requirement, because it is really easy to find stuff you can eat, whether you’re vegan/vegetarian, gluten-free, kosher, halal, or whatever else.

There is much else that is great about them. You can cap your delivery charges by buying a thing called a Smart Pass, which means you pay up front for the year and it’ll pay for itself within a few months, plus you get extra discounts on certain products and occasional sales which are restricted to Smart Pass holders (I have picked up a bit of kitchen equipment and similar that way). Then there’s the fact that if you spend more than you would have done if you’d done your shopping at [major competitor], they’ll give you a voucher for the difference, so you never end up spending any more than you would have done at [major competitor], even if you don’t allow for delivery charges, which work out more at the other place. Oh, and they’ll also credit you with 10p for every one of their bags you return for recycling, since legally they are forced to charge you 10p for the things when you get them. They are popular here in Jankyville; I see more of their vans around the place than I do from all the other supermarkets put together.

But… there are just a few places where they could improve; and there always tend to be computers involved in these areas.

The first is the bag packing. It is quite common to be handed a bag with only one item in it, which would have easily fitted into one of the other bags; it is rarer, but it does sometimes happen, that they cram everything into too few bags. That happened last week, and it is a bit of a problem when it does, because Ocado bags are not really meant for moving shopping very far. Your goods are delivered in crates containing a number of bags of shopping, so the bags are flimsy because that is all they need to be. If there’s too much heavy stuff in one, the handles are going to snap. So I said to the driver, “H’mm… could have done with more bags here, I think,” and the driver explained it was AI.

I was a little taken aback. What was AI doing packing my bags? But, no, they have AI-powered robots to do the packing, with a few humans keeping an eye on them because they frequently drop things… and the AI is iffy, which explains why the packing is kind of stupid at times. Very occasionally something is missing altogether, or there’s a product I didn’t order (I always contact them about this and they invariably tell me to keep it, which generally means I end up giving it away); that hasn’t happened for a while now, so it’s getting better in that respect, but still. You would not have thought it was so difficult to teach the thing the weights of all the items and some index of general fragility, so that you could teach it to do the kind of things a 16-year-old straight out of school with moderate learning difficulties could manage. Such as “don’t load any bag beyond a certain weight”, and “don’t put anything heavy/solid on top of anything fragile/squashy/vulnerable like fruit or bread”, and “try to distribute the weight evenly among the number of bags you’re using”. I forget exactly what they put on top of one of my packets of pitta bread this time, but I had to ease them gently apart.

And then there are the predicted orders, which I view with a mixture of surprise, mild annoyance, and utter bewilderment. Like everyone else I had difficulty getting delivery slots during the COVID lockdown; unlike most other people, I was at that point living here in Jankyville, where there are no physical shops, so if I didn’t get a delivery slot I wasn’t just inconvenienced, I was stuck. So, to help with that, Ocado brought in a system where you could reserve a regular slot to make sure you got one. However, they can’t reserve a slot for you unless there is an order to fill it, so what they do is they predict what they think you’re going to order and then encourage you to edit that nearer the time.

I am, by now, almost 100% convinced that these predictions work mainly on averages. What you’ve bought in the past does enter into it, and for things you buy every week it’s very good. My predicted orders reliably include the correct quantities of chocolate oat milk, orange juice, not-beef mince, and a couple of other things. But for other stuff…

For instance, I get through exactly one baking potato every week (in two portions, as I can’t eat a whole one at once). This means that every four weeks I buy a pack of four baking potatoes. I’ve been doing this for at least three years now, possibly more, but the algorithm they’re using has not worked it out yet. It predicts baking potatoes quite randomly, as far as I can see, and a lot more often than I buy them. The same goes for aubergines (usually one every 4-5 weeks, as it goes in the batch of curry); what is collectively known as Church Lunch Stuff (always in the week immediately before the first Sunday in the month, and always the same three or four items, which I never buy individually); tinned tomatoes; and a few other things I buy with what ought to be predictable regularity, but not weekly. It also has no idea how long it takes me to get through something. It’s common for it to predict I want a bottle of oil the week after I bought the last one. Even if I’m baking, there’s no way I’m going to get through it at that speed.

It has also apparently not twigged that there are certain things (like olive tapenade, Calgon tablets, loo paper, and non-alcoholic Shiraz) that I don’t buy unless they are on offer; and that there are other things that I may buy three of when there is an offer on three of them, because they keep, and that this does not imply that I want another three next week when they are no longer on offer. I have enough to last me till your next offer, thank you.

I don’t quite buy all my groceries from Ocado. For bulk stuff like sugar (I like the unrefined variety), oats, nutritional yeast, cashews, and so on, plus spices, I go to BWFO because it’s cheaper; also, neither of those two does my favourite chocolate truffles, so I get those elsewhere, and I buy Vive bars straight from Vive because that is very much the cheapest way to get them. Those things require a bit of thinking ahead because they come in the post and the timings are not always very predictable, whereas with Ocado you know for a fact it’ll show up during the slot you specified (barring major disasters, of course). They have very reliable human beings.

The computers, though...

Ah, the first faint inklings of autumn. We have finally had some rain over here worthy of the name, including a very brief thunderstorm the other day which was nonetheless impressive while it lasted; and the grass, which has been looking like a very ill-used coir doormat since about May, has seized the opportunity with relish and is already starting to sprout again. What’s more, my American friends online are just starting to complain about leaf-blowers. Yes, autumn is in the air all right.

Leaf-blowers are not really a thing over here. I believe you can get them, but I’ve never seen or (perhaps more relevantly) heard one in action; they are, I am told, very noisy. Over here, you get a broom, or a rake, or both, depending on the precise location and state of your leaves, and you clear them up manually; you might stick them in the compost heap or just dig them into the borders, as they do make excellent mulch. My friend with whom I usually have lunch on a Thursday does this a lot, because she and her husband have a couple of large deciduous trees growing near their house – great for shade in the summer, but rather a nuisance once the leaves start to fall. But the main thing is that over here we deal with our fallen leaves rather more quietly.

Noise is an odd thing. It definitely does depend a lot on what sort of noise it is, as well as how loud. I have a very high tolerance for music practice, provided that there is at least some evidence that it’s working; my upstairs neighbour, who is a thoroughly nice person, tried learning the bass guitar for a while, and I did start having a bit of a problem with that because she was clearly getting nowhere. (So I bemoaned the fact to Athos, and Athos said that if I wanted to know how the bass guitar ought to be played I should go and look up a young man called Charles Berthoud on YouTube. All I can say is, yes, that is absolutely how the bass guitar should be played, and if my upstairs neighbour had managed to get even one hundredth as good as that I’d have been quite happy!) I am fairly OK with machinery, up to a point; a little drilling outside won’t bother me, but it will start to grate if they’re doing it for the entire working day. I don’t like traffic noise, but then in general I don’t like traffic, so there is a certain amount of bias there. I don’t like any kind of background noise when I’m trying to have a conversation, even if it is music I might quite like in other circumstances.

But what I really hate more than anything else is people having screaming rows.

Screaming rows are just stressful. There is no way round the fact. They’re stressful even if you’re not involved and have no clue what is going on or what they’re fighting about. The whole thing is just, to use the modern phrase, really bad vibes. You sit there wishing fervently that they could have communicated better in the first place, or, failing that, at least one of them had realised they were getting annoyed and gone out for a walk or something to cool down. And I used to have a pair of neighbours who did this regularly.

The walls in those houses were very thin. It was all plasterboard and cladding; there wasn’t a brick in the place. You could hear if someone coughed next door. So when Karen and her husband or partner or whatever exactly he was started up, you would get it full blast. The individual words wouldn’t be very clear except for the fact that there was always a lot of swearing, but the general import was extremely obvious.

So I developed a defence. There is this particular Bach organ toccata; I forget exactly which one because I no longer have the cassette tape (yes, it was a long time ago), but let’s just say it’s Bach not being at all shy. The stops are being pulled out here with gusto. And every time they started one of their rows, I would put on this Bach. I didn’t play it at excessive volume; I didn’t have to. It’s a loud piece to begin with, and if I could hear them, they could hear the Bach. The main thing, of course, was that I could also hear the Bach and it drowned out the swearing; but I was also quite happy for them to learn that if they were going to row, I was going to adopt baroque self-defence measures.

Four or five toccatas later, they got the message. I don’t know if they stopped fighting, but they certainly stopped doing it in the room which was right on the other side of the party wall.

Thanks, Bach!