For all my griping about technology sometimes it works wonders, like this morning when a former student working on an article for a magazine asked if I knew an expert on a fairly esoteric topic and I knew just the person. The student texted me on my phone and I sent a message via Facebook to my contact, who gave me an email address to give the former student, completing a circuit that only worked because of the presence of a human being in the middle--me!
For a moment I felt like Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp character in Modern Times, when he's moving smoothly through the gears of the machine without being ground to pieces. Sometimes, though, the machinery doesn't work quite so smoothly and someone gets crushed, as in last weekend's tech fiasco or the big Zoom outage yesterday or, on a smaller scale, today's lunch.
I've been bringing my lunch to work, see, packing a sandwich and a few cherry tomatoes in a bag so I can sit outside by the butterfly garden in the middle of the day and enjoy a few moments of peace. Today, though, I didn't bring my lunch to campus, so I thought I'd do my part to stimulate the local economy. But blood-pressure-wise, a crowded food venue is the exact opposite of the butterfly garden; I'm just not comfortable lingering in a small space with a large number of people, so I thought I'd try the campus food service's new online ordering system.
Except it doesn't work. Online ordering will be available "soon," whatever that means. So okay, I can stimulate the local economy by going off campus, and guess what--my favorite farm market offers online ordering! So I went to their website, ordered my favorite sandwich, put in my credit card number, and headed for the car. Road construction delayed me a bit so I arrived long after my sandwich should have been ready, but it wasn't. They had no record of my order--lost in the ether. They kindly invited me to order in person, which would require standing in a long line of people crammed into a small space, but I could feel my blood pressure rising so I politely declined.
No, I did not get my money back. That's how nervous I am about crowded public spaces: I'm willing to forfeit $5.99 to avoid standing in a crowd long enough to get a refund on a lost order.
So I left, but I was still hungry. By that point every fast-food place I passed had a massive line of cars waiting for the drive-through, and wouldn't it be interesting to know the environmental impact of all those cars idling in drive-through lines all over the world? But I saw a McDonald's with a short line and zipped on in there, only to discover that the menu offers very little that I found appetizing. But after my long detour to the farm market I needed to get back to campus so I ordered food that I didn't even like just to get out of there.
Clearly the technology is not entirely at fault here. I mean, I wouldn't have had such a lousy lunch if I'd made my own sandwich or overcome my fear of crowded public places, but I've spent so much time kicking myself for my frequent technological snafus lately that I really need another target lest I become little more than a walking bruise, so I'm going to blame the online ordering system, which ground me up like a fast-food burger and spat me out in an unappetizing heap.
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