Personal Feedback

If you have ever bid or sold on Ebay or any other online auctions, you know that every member has his/her own feedback number. It increases if you were a good buyer/seller, and decreases if you don't pay, or if the item is broken, late, etc., etc.....Then of course, there's neutral, which is nothing more than people who want to leave bad feedback but are too nice to.

I've had this idea for quite a while, but an incident yesterday convinced me to start writing this. We're sitting in line at the McDonald's drive-thru. Someone 3 cars ahead of us, realizing his order wasn't complete, parks his car, IN THE DRIVE-THRU LANE, and goes inside. Great. So there's this line of cars behind him, stuck because he's either an idiot or a complete ass.

Now here's where my idea kicks in. There were 5 cars behind him, so he'd automatically lose 5 personal feedback points. Actually he'd lose 7, because the first 2 cars behind him drove over the curb to get around him, so they could take 2 points each because of possible damage to their cars. And if you really wanted to, you could take a point from the dumb kids inside who didn't make the order right the first time.

Good deeds would add points, and bad deeds or plain stupidity, as seen above, would lessen them. And as I showed above, some actions could add or subtract more than 1 point. Saving a life, for example, would certainly be worth more than 1. How much more, I wouldn't know....there'd have to be some sort of scale created, or it could be the person who's leaving the feedback's personal choice. And if an action affects multiple people, then multiple people can leave points.

So how could these points all be evaluated and maintained? I dunno, I guess a government agency or something (and gov't members, local and federal, are banned from having points, since they'd all be in the negatives anyway and would simply pay people off or threaten them to give positive points). Surely, they wouldn't go right in the data, since it would be inevitable that people would pick someone they don't like and 'Negative feedback', or NF, the hell out of them. Or people would pay to get more positive feedback, or PF.
To maintain and find out about points, one idea I had was to make available Feedback Machines, or FM's. They'd be very similar to ATM's, except you'd punch in your Social Security #. That's how your points would be tracked. So how could you find out the points of the jerk who has to park next to you and take up 2 parking spots so you can't even get in your car? Easy, the machines would also take license plate #'s. Now maybe that wouldn't be fair since the person driving may not be the person the car's registered to, but that's what they get for letting an idiot take their car out. And if it's stolen, you have a great new method for tracking stolen vehicles. Bam!
Ok, so then how would you get the name or info on the guy who tries mugging you in the park? This is where my idea goes flat, since there really is no way to find out. Unless you kick HIS ass instead and take HIS wallet (just for his info, of course.....)

So even if they did devise a way to put this all in effect, what would the feedback rating actually do? That's hard to say....maybe you'd be more convinced to buy from certain people, accept help from strangers when you're stuck or lost, many day-to-day things could be examples. So what would happen to people with a lot of negative points? In my lil' fantasy world, they'd be sent to certain remote areas of the country, deported (a very small percentage, the ones with atrocious scores), or used for various jobs: road cleanup, sorting at recycling centers, or cleaning beachfronts are a few of the jobs I can think of. Hey, why not, they're the jerks of society. If we have to keep them around, why not make them useful?

There are many flaws in this idea, and I've pointed out just a few. But wouldn't it be nice if you could just punch into your lil' computer data thing or whatever they'd make that some jerk is plugging up the drivethru? As for now, however, we still have our basic and popular options: yelling, flipping them off, and kicking their ass.