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Skinned as you wait
Page 35
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The sleight-of-hand specialist who can unknowingly relieve you of your braces without removing your jacket is a bungler compared with the scientist. The forces of science are being marshalled to take off your shirt as well.
According to BP Oil, it will be possible soon for drivers paying for fuel with credit cards to 'wipe'' them through a machine which in six seconds will record the transaction, note the number of the account to be debited and issue a receipt.
But BP and other oil corn panies have ways of relieving you of your money even quicker than that. It is technically possible to link the forecourt pump direct to the customer's bank account through a signal bounced off a communications satellite.
The snag is that the complete equipment, from the pump via the Post Office to the bank account, will have to be verified by the Department of Trade, which, according to Geoffrey Sheppard, BP Oil's retail manager, would take 1 8 months. By the time the system was put into operation it would be obsolete.
An equally ambitious note is struck by The Economist Intelligence Unit, which tells me that within a decade silicon chips will permit "telephoning the oven or the direct debiting of grocery bills from the supermarket checkout."
And in the south of Scotland, electronic machines are to be used experimentally to enable meter readers to issue electricity bills on the doorstep.
All you need now is a machine that will produce the money faster than the bills.
If on telephoning your oven you hear a loud crackling you will know that you have had your chips.