Friday, September 19, 2008

Welcome to the Future (ugh)

The other day, I had a meeting in downtown San Francisco. This is not such an exceptional event in and of itself, but over the past however many years, most of my meetings have been down in the heart of Silicon Valley, which is quite a different world than this, my adopted home city, and the birthplace of all six of my kids.

The way the day was supposed to go was like this: Junko and I would drive a zipcar down to the city garage at 5th & Mission. From there, I would walk down to my meeting at 2nd & Howard, while she shopped in the area near that garage.

My meeting should take about 30 mins, after which I'd call her and we would reunite, back up at the garage, and zipcar some more. But things never really work out the way we think they should, right?

My meeting went over an hour; as I said my good-byes to my colleagues and started back up Mission Street toward the garage, I realized an awful fact. I'd left my cell phone at home.

No problem. I would just find a pay phone. Block after block, I sought said phone booth. There wasn't one here, not one there. Not this direction, nor that direction.

No problem. Hotels have banks of pay phones. So I detoured into the first of three hotels. "Sorry, sir, we no longer have those amenities."

Okay, bars have phones, right? To call a cab. I ducked into three of those. "Sorry, sir, we no longer have a phone you could use."

"Man, this really sucks," my hopeful self said to my cynical self. "There just seems to be no possible way to call Junko." Hmmm, maybe I should ask an average citizen. Everybody has a cell phone, right?

-30-

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