One of the banks was kind enough to post a flyer to me advertising their credit card. On one side is written the benefits of using a credit card. Life is too short to read that but the other side has three pictures that say a great deal about the contempt we are to have for each other. Picture one: a man is seen handing his card to the disembodied hand of a shop assistant while talking on his mobile phone. That’s convenience: you don’t even have to dignify the overweight pleb behind the counter with the human speech act: you can save that for the people who count, the ones in your mobile phone’s memory. Picture two is perhaps a little less offensive. It shows a different man and a woman doing their shopping. The same disembodied hand (the shop assistant in all three pictures is identical in his/her anonymity) is accepting the card – from the man of course, not from the woman. In the third and last picture an old woman is paying. In her arms she holds a baby (actually it looks more like one of the oompa loompas in Willie Wonka’s factory). That’s the life: you don’t have to speak to workers providing you with goods and services and your ould one will look after the progeny you spawned with the foxy but penniless chick in picture two.