Notes from the River

I am by no means a fast food connoisseur, but I am fond of an occasional post-work In-N-Out trip, especially if the line isn’t half a mile long. I’m also not a regular at the drive-thru window, as I believe it is the epitome of laziness.

Or at least I used to think that.

Society has become rapidly desensitized to the robots that occupy our spaces previously reserved exclusively for humans. Robot cars, robot food delivery machines, the stupid robot machine that makes you bag your own groceries, the robot in your phone that doesn’t understand your accent, and so on. They’re fucking everywhere, taking away our once-sacred face-to-face interactions.

It was a breath of fresh air to be greeted by an actual human being on my most recent journey through the In-N-Out drive-thru. There was no way to order ahead or call in the order, so I had no choice but to be inconvenienced, to sit in my car and wait for the line to move. This was a welcome reprieve from the usual streamlined order interface online or on one of those stupid big screened kiosks. More than that, I had the privilege of talking to not one, not two, but three different employees as I progressed through the line. The experience was almost charming in its clunkiness. It genuinely made me feel nostalgic for the quotidian frustrations of the pre-smartphone era.

I’m sure that I’m viewing the past with nostalgia goggles, and that the In-N-Out drive-thru is not an experience as close to heaven as we have on earth. What I’m really trying to say is that sharing spaces and experiences with other humans, even if it’s as simple as ordering a Double-Double®, is an essential part of the human experience. Sometimes it feels as though we’ve forgotten that the most central tenet of human life is community.

This reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s story about an envelope:

“Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is – we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.“