I haven't spoken to the person at the large national coffee chain that actually makes my morning drink in about six months.
It's nothing personal.
It is, however, the result of a phenomenon I began contemplating recently. Probably in the drive-through line at a restaurant, since you've got plenty of time to think there. And do the New York Times crossword puzzle and stick your head out the window and get a tan and call every single person you know while the driver ahead of you asks about the preparation methods and humane sourcing of his double chili-cheese Coney Dog. But I digress. And rant.
Seriously, I haven't spoken a word inside my coffee house of preference in about half a year.
Not, of course, that anyone involved may miss this. I'm sure the person behind the counter in most of my earlier exchanges doesn't want for my routine morning conversation, which tends to veer wildly between pre-coffee monosyllabic grunts and Dad Jokes (my personal favorite: "Guy walks into a coffee shop with a frog on his head. Barista says, 'where did you get that?' Frog says, 'I don't know, it started off as a wart on my navel, and I'll take a Grande with cream and two sweeteners.'").
It's just that, thanks to the magic of cellular communication, I've become a party to one of the great ironies of our age: I can carry my phone with me everywhere, but I don't necessarily speak to anyone.
OK, I know. Just a few weeks ago, I was extolling the virtues of my phone as a travel aid. And now it appears I'm having my own one-man debate, and I'm on the "con" side. Which either proves I'm open to new ways of looking at things, or I have a split personality. Hey, better to have two than none, right?
It's just that so many facets of our new age of communication fascinate me. And when I get fascinated by something, well, why should only the members of my immediate family suffer?
Seriously, in just that little corner of the world where I get my coffee, I have the option to order my breakfast by app, then cruise through the building and pick it up, all without uttering a word.
I can fill up at a self-serve gas station and grab some groceries by ordering online, entering a code and popping my trunk. If we (as in the Lovely Mrs. Smith, because, well, I know my limitations) don't want to cook, I can make reservations for dinner on an app that keeps me from being put on hold to listen to some rockin' elevator music before being told the person who was helping me went on break and what did I want?
I can shop online, ship it online and even pay the bill online. Of course, only two of those things come without cursing and tears. I'll let you guess which ones.
All of this may actually be pretty great in the long run (Seriously? You like grocery shopping on a Sunday? And it's about time someone else has to look for the garlic cheese and whatever other obscure stuff The Lovely Mrs. Smith adds to the list just to remind me that shopping is hard?), but it does seem to me a bit odd.
After all, thanks to the wonders of technology, we can now partake in the rich tapestry of all of humanity. We just don't have to do it while actually speaking to people.
OK, I know. As a trained journalist, it's my job to take every fairly mundane situation, determine there are "two sides" to it and assure people that at least one of them offers dire consequences to us all. And if you're sufficiently whipped into a panic by all this, consider my work here done.
But it is sometimes startling to realize the amount of isolation we've confined ourselves to in the name of expedience. And the tech-inspired petulance that develops in a world where we have virtually anything we want whenever we want it without having to speak or even pause to exchange payment, thanks to apps that allow us to cut in every line.
If you "never have to wait," actual waiting has grown men fussing and throwing their toys like 3-year-olds. Or so I'm told. Because, you know, I wouldn't do that.
I read somewhere that at one point, our tonsils served a critical, if currently unknown, purpose. And as that purpose became less significant, our tonsils became less useful, until now they don't do anything at all but make us sick and allow us to eat lots of ice cream as a method of recovery. Which doesn't make them all bad.
How long, then, before our ability to speak begins to fade, our voices become relics of a distance past, the ability to make vocal noise diminishes until only, say, Beyonce can actually generate sound.
OK, maybe it won't be so bad.
Commentary on 07/29/2016