Today I watched my avatar steal my seat on the 80 bus and ride off down North Capitol St; leaving me standing there, befuddled and slack-jawed, on the street corner. OK, so maybe he didn’t take my seat, per se, but the point is he was where I should be and not, as he was, riding away from me.
You see, over the past several weeks I’ve begun an ambitious project to completely reengineer the way I live my life. I’ve found that, despite promises made in the nineties, the digital revolution has not made our lives any easier. As we move more and more of our lives to the cybersphere, we just create more things to keep track of. This task is made more difficult by the fact that while the Internet is infinite, we can only access it one page of the time, through the tiny window of our computer screens. Because of this, I find myself struggling to juggle the many aspects of a life that is haphazardly divided between virtual and physical worlds. So I’ve set out to merge these two worlds as best I can. I want my screens to free me to enjoy the real world around me, not tether me to my machines for hours each day.
Which brings me back to the avatar on the bus. Today I set out on what was, I thought, a fairly simple task. I was going to take public transportation to downtown silver spring for a doctor’s appointment. But I was going to do so in the most digitally an advanced way. I put a shortcut on my smartphone that told me when the next bus would arrive at the stop in front of my house. The next bus was coming in 11 minutes. If I had just gone off the paper schedule, which seemed to be no less a fabrication than Bernie Madoff’s financial statements, I would already be out waiting for the bus, scheduled to arrive in 3 minutes. Great! My new life on the cutting edge of digital technology had already saved me 8 minutes, and I was just getting started. Google tells me that the bus trip to the Brookland Metro Station will take approximately 9 minutes, giving me just enough time to catch the red line train that my phone tells me will get to the station at 10:32. That train would arrive at Silver Spring at 10:40, giving me 10 minutes to walk to the doctor’s office and another 10 to fill out my life story on their beloved clipboard o’ forms. So I let the clock wind down to 2 on my phone, and moseyed across the street to the bus stop. I look down to the end of the street and could see the bus just starting to crest over the hill. Excellent. Like clockwork. If I had just put my phone away, patted myself on the back, and gotten on the bus, none of this would have happened.
But I wanted to watch as the clock on my phone switched from “1 min” to “ARR.” Why I would rather see a digital representation of an event on a tiny 4-inch screen, rather than looking up and seeing it happen right in front of me is a question that has puzzled members of my parents’ generation for years. So I was lost in the digital world as the bus arrived, simultaneously, in both the real world and the virtual.
Except, in the real world…..it didn’t stop. Why hadn’t the bus stopped for me? It wasn’t full. I was clearly standing there at the stop. Some may argue that I was standing kind of in the no-man’s land between the bus stop and the cross-walk. Seeing an unusual sight (a well-dressed white kid in Northeast DC), the bus driver could have come to one of two conclusions: Either A) I was waiting for the bus, or B) new to the district, I had somehow gotten lost in my travels, and was merely acting calm to mask my terror, desperately waiting for the light to change so I could cross back into the Northwest quadrant. I guess more $700 smartphones are checked while waiting at the crosswalk than at the bus station.
Whatever his reasons, the bus driver must have landed on the second option. Just as my phone satisfactorily displayed “Next Bus: ARR,” the bus roared past, the driver unable to see me standing there through the thick fog of reverse racism and prejudice clouding his thoughts.
That’s where digital me and the real me separated. I could see him as my phone tracked the bus, smugly enjoying the ride to the metro station. All I was left with was a sad reminder that I was stuck in the real world – “Next Bus: 37 mins.” So I started walking.
Digital Dan made the 10:32 red line train easily. Real-life, DNA Dan still had a 19 minute walk ahead of him. Digital Dan was early to his doctor’s appointment. DNA Dan was 25 minutes late. Gee, thanks for those 8 minutes you saved me waiting for the bus, Internet.
So my cybervoyage got off to a somewhat inauspicious start. I was horribly late despite my precision planning. And I was the victim of a hate crime! I thought Obama ended all of that. O well, Columbus didn’t turn around at the first sight of a storm cloud, nor will I. But he probably learned to pick his head up from his phone screen every once and a while. Maybe I should learn to do so as well.
