h2>Dating : To Be Surprised or Not to Be?
The world is in the grip of the Coronavirus and many people across the globe are working from home. Ron was a programmer, classified as a keyboarder, and relegated to working from home. He was quite safe from the virus, but certainly not safe from cabin fever. In theory, video conferencing tools could replace face to face meetings, and he was now an unwitting participant in a global experiment to replace the personal touch with video.
It was Monday, Ron was sitting in a room with white indistinct walls, three pictures, and some flower pots.
It was Tuesday, he was sitting in a white room with three pictures and some flower pots.
It was Wednesday, he was still in the same room.
Normally, in an office, you randomly meet people when you go get coffee. So, he decided to go do that, but there was no one he hasn’t recently seen in the break room. In fact, it was the kitchen, instead of the break room, and his wife, Susan, said:
“Have you seen my email from this morning? The superintendent may not open the school year in August. Learning will be entirely online. Some parents are worried about the restrooms being shared between different classes, so he said they were going to clean them once an hour and use ultra-violet light for sanitation.”
“I can just see it, a kid goes with a hazmat suit to school, but can’t open his backpack because the gloves are too thick. The teacher can’t understand him, so he takes off his mask to talk. He opens his mouth to speak and another kid puts on a latex glove on lightning-fast, tackles him, and puts the wrong hand on his face. The world globe, quietly perched on a high shelf next to its friends the science books, falls and smashes on the floor. A girl sitting in the back unstraps a human-sized thick plastic shield from her back and crouches behind it, thinking `you can never be too safe`.“
He retreated downstairs to the relative quiet of the workroom. He worked at a high-tech firm which offered working from home, however, it was an order, not a suggestion. You had to work from home, you couldn’t go to the office. All aspects of work were conducted online, meetings were done with video conferencing; email and files were on the cloud. He woke up every morning at 6:30, had breakfast, started working at 9 am, stopped at 6 pm, had dinner with the family, and went to bed at 9 pm. Every day was the same. He knew what was going to happen in advance, there were no surprises. He couldn’t accidentally meet someone and learn about a great new book, a good coffee shop, or a unique running watch.
This was the situation for three months when he finally had enough. He was going to wake up at 5:30 and do breathing exercises, this was advocated in a self-mastery Ted talk he watched. It was night time, the heat of the day started to dissipate, the birds found their night perches, and traffic had diminished to a trickle. He set his alarm clock to 5:30 in the morning, confident he will wake up to a brand new day.
He woke up at 6:30 with the pillow covering his ears, then he remembered the dream. The birds were making a racket, so he put the pillow over his head and went back to sleep. In the morning light, it was clear it had been the alarm clock. Disappointed, he went to brush his teeth, at which point it occurred to him that the bright side was that he was totally fresh. Had he woken up an hour early, he would be unfocused the whole day.
As night fell, and he lay in bed thinking about what tomorrow was going to bring. He decided to set up a meeting with a random person in the company. He thought about the longest word he knew and took the last letter. Then, he scanned the company directory for the first person with a family name that started with that letter. Next, he sent a zoom invitation for the next day at 11 am. He figured it would be a safe hour because it was squarely after breakfast, and solidly before lunch. Hence, the person, Patricia Merigold, would definitely be free. After all, nobody was doing anything these days.
The next day, he had breakfast with the family, and anxiously waited for 11 am. Patricia had accepted the invitation, and he started the call at 11 sharp. He didn’t know the first thing about Patricia, except that she worked in the company. He wanted to meet somebody he never met before. This was the new experience he was craving for, a breath of fresh mountain air, a totally accidental occurrence, unplanned, but wanted.
It was 11:05 and nobody came. Then it was 11:15, 11:20, 11:30. Something was wrong; “Maybe something happened to her?” he thought. Taking a close look at the invitation, he found that it was for two years hence. That evening he thought, and cogitated, and reminisced about the old days. Then he had an idea. He was going to send an email to the entire company.
The next day he wrote a long detailed letter to the entire company. He pressed send and felt no regrets. A minute later a response popped up in his inbox. “So fast?” He pretended not to be interested and continued working. This lasted about a minute, at which point he read the reply:
do not send to this address, it is blocked due to misuse by robots and unscrupulous corporations looking to sell you merchandise you don’t need. Do not reply if you receive emails from this address. Harsh measures will be taken against employees using this address.
He gasped. “Wow, I had really done it this time,” he felt his heart in his throat, his belly was developing butterflies. But then, it dawned on him. “Something extraordinary is about to happen, unplanned, unforeseen, and new.” Finally.
THE END.
