The Chip-Reader Rant: A One-Minute Comedy Bit From July 2017 (Not About Keto)
In this recording
- [0:00] I'm at a checkout trying to pay for a drink. They tell me to swipe. No, it's a chip card, so insert it. Then I'm handed a little digital pen. Then a paper receipt to sign. Then I'm told the sale is under $25, so no signature needed, while I'm still holding the pen.
- [0:38] The card has to come out before I sign, the terminal starts beeping about the card, and by the end there are "nine different procedures" for paying with plastic. The punchline: it's like a sobriety test to buy something. Then it ends.
What this is
It's a joke. A one-minute rant about card terminals, recorded in July 2017, with nothing about food, carbs or weight in it. It came out of the same folder of unsorted 2017 clips as the early keto videos, which is the only reason it's on this site at all.
The date is the interesting part. By my own count I started keto on 2017-06-13 (video cTGYIFOTPl8), so this was recorded about five weeks in, and about two weeks before the first "keto update for my friends" went up on YouTube (video 9Hk0jRb_9Es). At that point I wasn't a keto channel yet. Some of what I recorded was keto and some of it was this.
Watching this in 2026
I'm leaving it as what it is. There's no lesson hidden in a chip reader, and I'm not going to invent one. If you want the version of me from that summer talking about keto, start with the first update and the beginner Q&A below. Same guy, same impatience with pointless procedures. In those videos the procedure I'm impatient with is overcomplicated diet rules, not card machines.
That impatience is the thread, if there is one. In the beginner Q&A I said people in the forums were confused by too much information and I wanted to keep it really simple (video cTGYIFOTPl8). This clip is the same reaction aimed at a checkout counter.
Key points
- A one-minute comedy bit from 2017-07-19 about paying by card. No keto or nutrition content.
- Recorded about five weeks into my own keto start, before my first keto videos went up on YouTube on 2017-07-31.
- For actual keto content from that period, see the related videos.