About three days ago I was driving home from work. I'd spent all day working on a computer with "documents" which are formatted for print but will never be printed out. I spent more time talking to people on chat than I did face to face.
During the drive I adjusted the environment controls in the car because the weather was changing, all the while listening to music on my car radio. But the music wasn't coming from a radio station — it was from my phone, which has a low-wattage FM transmitter. And while my phone can be used as a phone, most weeks it spends more time acting as a low-wattage, miniature FM station with a robot DJ that plays this list I made up.
By the time I was three-quarters of the way home, I was starting to feel hungry, and I had a lot of chores to do, so I decided to stop at a restaurant near my house and eat there to save time. The restaurant claims to be a sports bar, but the two sports channels on the six TV screens were just showing crash reels. One station was showing a guy accidentally throwing his golf club instead of hitting the ball. The other one was showing race cars on a track, all crashing into each other because they were trying to avoid a kangaroo that had wandered out onto the racetrack.
And even though the restaurant was making an attempt to be a sports bar by tuning in to these sport stations (that weren't playing any sports), the place was full of mothers with kids. The mothers and kids seemed to be having nice meals out, but none of them were watching the TV screens.
I ordered nachos, which tasted like... restaurant nachos. The chips were green and white. The cheese was plasticky — I couldn't even tell you what kind of cheese it was supposed to be. The salsa didn't look like salsa, so I stuck with the sour cream and the guacamole.
The server left me the bill and a handful of after-dinner mints, which were sweetened with artificial sweeteners and flavoured with artificial flavours. As I waited for the debit card machine to complete the transaction to pay the bill, I looked around the restaurant. There was a little girl glancing from her plate to her mother, saying, "But Mommy, what is it?" From where I was sitting, I couldn't tell either.
Then what happened? Nothing. I drove home, got on my personal computer, did the stuff I had to do.
And then stayed up all night, trying to remember the last time I did something that didn't involve looking through glass — window or screen — or accepting someone else's idea of a comfortable environment.
Can you?
During the drive I adjusted the environment controls in the car because the weather was changing, all the while listening to music on my car radio. But the music wasn't coming from a radio station — it was from my phone, which has a low-wattage FM transmitter. And while my phone can be used as a phone, most weeks it spends more time acting as a low-wattage, miniature FM station with a robot DJ that plays this list I made up.
By the time I was three-quarters of the way home, I was starting to feel hungry, and I had a lot of chores to do, so I decided to stop at a restaurant near my house and eat there to save time. The restaurant claims to be a sports bar, but the two sports channels on the six TV screens were just showing crash reels. One station was showing a guy accidentally throwing his golf club instead of hitting the ball. The other one was showing race cars on a track, all crashing into each other because they were trying to avoid a kangaroo that had wandered out onto the racetrack.
And even though the restaurant was making an attempt to be a sports bar by tuning in to these sport stations (that weren't playing any sports), the place was full of mothers with kids. The mothers and kids seemed to be having nice meals out, but none of them were watching the TV screens.
I ordered nachos, which tasted like... restaurant nachos. The chips were green and white. The cheese was plasticky — I couldn't even tell you what kind of cheese it was supposed to be. The salsa didn't look like salsa, so I stuck with the sour cream and the guacamole.
The server left me the bill and a handful of after-dinner mints, which were sweetened with artificial sweeteners and flavoured with artificial flavours. As I waited for the debit card machine to complete the transaction to pay the bill, I looked around the restaurant. There was a little girl glancing from her plate to her mother, saying, "But Mommy, what is it?" From where I was sitting, I couldn't tell either.
Then what happened? Nothing. I drove home, got on my personal computer, did the stuff I had to do.
And then stayed up all night, trying to remember the last time I did something that didn't involve looking through glass — window or screen — or accepting someone else's idea of a comfortable environment.
Can you?