The Thing With No Name.
They’re everywhere. You use them daily. Shouldn’t they have a name of their own?
You’ve seen them. You’ve held them in your hands — repeatedly. In fact, most of us use one several times daily. But somehow, the powers-that-be forgot to give the damn things a name.
I speak, of course, of those small but oh-so-powerful tools of money-seeking shopkeepers and restaurant servers everywhere, the portable credit card payment-processing machine, or as you and I more commonly know it, simply the “machine”. All of the combined economic and corporate might of the world’s most successful financial corporations, and the best they can come up with for their treasured multi-billion dollar profit-generating loot-intake technology is “machine”?
Banks and payment processing companies are the 800 pound gorillas of capitalism. You’d think if anyone would get the basics of commerce right, it would be these titans of global finance. And yet… here we are. I am trying to picture the scene when the banking-tech guys first pitched the proposal for these devices to their corporate overlords:
Credit Card Machine Project Lead: Boss, we think we’ve got a game-changer here. We believe this new tool has the potential to revolutionize how payments are made on a global scale for years, maybe generations…
