Unexpected person in office area

News story: Target will let downtown employees work from home, although they might have to — gasp — come into the office now and then. You can imagine the scowls: "What? Wear pants once a week? I hate capitalism."

Why stop there? In the ongoing effort to reduce all human interaction to a minimum, it's time to consider letting the self-checkout assistants work from home. You know who I'm talking about: the red-shirts who stand in the area where shoppers beep and bag, and deal with any problems that arise.

How it usually works: You beep something twice, because you have your headphones on and you're conducting "The Blue Danube," and one of your sweeping hand gestures runs the tin pot of paprika past the scanner twice. Or you're conducting Stravinsky's "Firebird," which is in 7/4 time, and you somehow end up with seven tins of paprika. For a moment you consider whether you will live long enough to eat this much paprika. But if you buy this much, you'll probably get a letter from the Hungarian embassy asking if you'd like to apply for citizenship.

So you turn toward the clerk, making small gestures of supplication, hoping they pick up on the signals: As a Minnesotan, attempting eye contact with a stranger indicates distress.

The assistant sees you, sorts you into one of several categories (made a common mistake, is running a scam, thinks the machine is the stupid one) and comes over. You explain.

"I was air-conducting Stravinsky and rang up this tin of paprika seven times."

"Really! Well, don't worry. We had someone in here the other day air-conducting Khachaturian's 'Sabre Dance,' and she rang up a toothpaste tube 42 times. Then there was the guy who was air-conducting 'The Flight of the Bumblebee.' "

"No, he could never get the thing in front of the scanner, because his hand kept vibrating and moving around. Anyway. ... "

The assistant types a 142-number sequence in 1.7 seconds.

"There you go."

"Thanks!" And then you resume, very carefully, because you don't want to call them over again for triple-beeping.

This could all be outsourced. There's a camera right there, and a TV screen. Call for help, and someone with a minuscule salary and no benefits whatsoever could appear and unlock your screen. Efficient! And it would lower costs, so someday bananas might be 2 cents cheaper.

And there's something to be said for "actual humans," I suppose. The other day I saw one of the guest assistants talking to a tot in the baby-seat area of the cart, booping its little shoes, making it smile, giving mom a moment to do the thing she'd come to do. It was charming.

But maybe you could just give the kid the phone, so it could stare at a video.

You'd have to train the remote-working assistants at Cub a bit differently, because they have a chore their Target counterparts are spared: convincing the machine that you have, indeed, put the item in the bag.

It works like this: You hit the button that says "I'm using my own bag."

You put the sack down.

You wonder: Does this thing have any attention span at all? What did we just talk about? So you hit "I'm using my own bag" again, and proceed. At some point, the device decides that something has gone horribly wrong and stops everything so the assistant can wander over, flash a badge in front of the scanner, type in a 362-number code and let you proceed.

But. You suspect they've been watching you. If you put in a steak without beeping it, then turned around and spread your arms in annoyance — here we go again, these stupid machines! — she might well peek at your bag and look at the items entered on the screen. This is not something an outsourced agent could do from home, unless the store invests in monitors and cameras mounted on wheeled poles, remotely controlled.

"Fine," you say, "bring on the robotic bag-error resolvers, I don't care." But you will, when you knock one over, and it says, "Unexpected cybernetic assistant in the floor area," and you wonder whether some guy in India with a laptop is looking at a picture of the ceiling now. Should you pick it up yourself? Is there a robot-assistant-assistant who will come along and wave a card and set it upright? What if they're working from home. too?

You wonder what the response would be if all the companies said, "Yes, of course, by all means, you can work at home! But if you want to keep your job, you have to sleep every night in the office."