After having to put the pedal to the medal of his solid gold, Zimmer Excalibur Tour Bus and zoom past his original WaWa stop in PA (cause there were 250 protesters waiting for him in the parking lot), Mittens cruised into another WaWa store, thus prompting the “Days Without Mitt Romney Acting Out in Public in a Shockingly Elitist Manner” clock to be set back to zero. Programmers had worked tirelessly over Father’s Day weekend to install code to override the faulty code that said it would never eat anything that came from a gas station, only to have Mitt sputter and spark with enthusiasm over a fucking convenience store. He was particularly flummoxed by what he calls a ‘touch tone’, like it’s a new fangled non-rotary phone that you type into and a freaking hoagie comes sliding out the other side, like in the goddamn Jetsons, sans hoagie guy behind the counter. The look of wonder that flickers across his face/motherboard again, as he puts bejeweled finger to touchscreen, is straight out of Huell Howser. Mitt likes the way the chain store serves as “a model of innovation in the private sector.” Let’s face it, automated stations are less a quantum leap in customer service than they are about saving businesses money by allowing them to hire fewer workers – obviously super exciting for Mittens.
Remember George Bush the First’s amazement over the automated supermarket checkout in the freaking 1990’s? Or Thomas Friedman, who was so blown away that robots could glue a windshield wiper on a Lexus that he couldn’t enjoy his Sushi lunch? I suppose that’s one thing the plutocrats have in common, amazement over after-the-fact technology advances. Because those guys got rich through financial “engineering”, sleazy old school industries like insurance or real estate, or fossil fuels. Or inheritance. Technology and science stuff, that’s just the nerd stuff the real economy manages to come up with despite them.