Thursday, October 14, 2010

When I was walking to my car during lunchtime today, which is to say my favorite time of day, I realized I was partaking in a glorified snack break for adults. You may recall your years in grade school, with the golden stretches of recess and nap time, and I ask you here, now, in the working world, whether anything has really changed. Consider the trajectory of a normal weekday. Step one: make it to lunch. Step two: try not to fall asleep after lunch. Sure, it may be a food coma, rather than a boring class, responsible for putting you under, but that’s merely a riff on an old theme.

Could it be that the march of time doesn’t actually march? This is what I mulled over as I drove to the dentist–not to eat there, obviously, but for a cleaning. Once in the waiting room, I listened to a fellow yammer loudly into his cellphone for a good 10 minutes. Business, you see. Shop talk for the rest of the waiting room to hear. It occurred to me the alternative to this arrangement, had this been 15, 20 years ago, before the advent of miniature mobile phones, would be small talk, and the trade-off suddenly didn’t seem so bad.

But then his call ended, followed by the telltale, self-satisfied sigh that usually means offline conversation is imminent, and I braced myself for the standard suite of topics: recent weather, where I’m from, what I do for a living, and then, God forbid, a segue into organized sports. At the same instant, I noticed there was political commentary pumping out of the flat-panel television, and an even worse scenario flashed across my mind, replete with sports talk and armchair analyses of the midterms. I had to take action.

I whipped out my own phone, then proceeded to be engrossed by it, typing away furiously with both thumbs. I guess I looked like I was texting? Two issues with this. First, I don’t think the clamshell design helped my case. Second, I don’t have texting capability or Internet connectivity on my phone. My button presses were used instead for browsing my collection of pre-loaded wallpapers and checking for a firmware update I knew wasn’t there. Modernity, in other words, yoked to the timeless art of avoiding people.