After 53 years, a wedding anniversary requires just a modest acknowledgment for me and the Bohunk. We dropped the stress of gift-giving years ago, and once the price of a greeting card cleared five bucks, we dropped those, too. Now, we exchange a ‘Happy Anniversary’ before the coffee is even brewed and call it a day. For most of those special days now, we go out for an afternoon meal. It’s our comfortable routine, making each occasion feel like just another day, in the best way.
This comfortable routine set the tone, as on the second-to-last Tuesday of March this year, we headed to Canal Park in Duluth for a special lunch at Cloud Nine, a new-to-me restaurant. It is a modern Asian-fusion restaurant and is rumored to be one of the best Sushi restaurants in our new hometown. The Bohunk doesn’t do Sushi, but I do, and to show her love and appreciation on our anniversary, she offered to buy and agreed to drive.
I remember when paying to park was simple. Drop a coin in a meter, listen to the timer grinding, and buy enough time for a meal. Or pull a ticket from a dispenser and get it validated at the business you are patronizing. So when the Bohunk turned left off Lake Avenue by the restaurant, I was blissfully unaware of how much of a hassle parking could be.
What greeted us there was a decidedly modern twist. Duluth is stripping away its mechanical meters in favor of a smartphone app called Park Duluth. Where a stout, coin-hungry meter would have been stood a lonely sign featuring a ‘QR code.’ Apparently, in the brave new world of the Zenith City, I’m expected to pull out a smartphone, squint through my reading glasses at a digital Rorschach test, and pray to the gods of cellular data just to occupy ten square feet of asphalt. It’s a significant cultural shift for old folks who have lived in the woods for the past 10 years.
Seeing a pair of septuagenarians squinting through reading glasses at a poorly backlit cellphone screen to “read” the QR code must have been pretty funny. No matter how close I stood and how firmly I held the phone against the winds of Lake Superior, I couldn’t see anything happening. Of course, I had no real experience with QR codes since I’ve never needed or wanted to use them.
QR codes were invented in 1994 by a Japanese company, Denso Wave, to track car parts in messy factories. QR seems to be short for Quick Response Code. It is a high-tech evolution of the traditional retail store barcode. A standard barcode is one-dimensional; it stores data only along its vertical black lines. A QR code is two-dimensional, storing data both horizontally and vertically in that “scrambled egg” grid of black-and-white squares.
When you point your phone’s camera at the code, it identifies the three corner squares to orient itself, converts the pattern of black-and-white dots into binary (1s and 0s), and then translates it back into a link. A QR code can actually have up to 30% of its surface destroyed or smudged, and your phone can still “math out” what the missing squares were supposed to be. Only later that fateful day did I find out that maybe I needed to turn on the QR reader in my camera settings.
The reason I’m seeing QR codes on every parking sign and restaurant table boils down to three things. Four, if you count the fact that AI is using QR codes and other devilish means to take over our lives. A traditional barcode contains about 20 characters, which is enough for things like product numbers. However, a QR code can store over 4,000 characters—enough data to include an entire website address or other detailed information. The three large squares in the corners of every QR code serve as “finder patterns” to guide and orient the phone’s camera while reading it.
As we got colder and colder in that parking lot, I tried to access the website on my Galaxy. But without wifi, the phone wouldn’t connect. My short temper took hold, and I said, “Eff it,” and we stormed into the restaurant. The Gen Z server who greeted us became the unintended target of my dwindling QR-rage. Ironically, for all the state-of-the-art tech in the parking lot, Cloud Nine still has you order sushi the old-fashioned way: a paper ticket and a golf pencil. It took ten seconds to park the car and eight minutes to fail at paying for the privilege. Happy Anniversary, indeed.
