Casey Gilfillan

The day begins like any other Wednesday would: I have a sore body from Tuesday’s shift and three hungry cats lurking along my bedside. I check the time and am pleased to find that it is 5:55 am; I turn off the barrage of alarms I had prepared for the morning. I fumble around for a pair of shorts and lead my pack to the kitchen to whip out the wet food, fish oil, and Gabapentin. The litter robot’s whirring compliments the hum of my coffee machine as it begins to brew.

I patrol breakfast – ensuring that nobody consumes enough to induce vomiting or gets bullied out of their fair share – and then add creamer to my coffee before scurrying back to bed. I stack the pillows for support so I can sit, while tugging the blankets upwards in an attempt to marry the slumbering allure with an alertness for the day. With my laptop and my coffee, I feel emboldened at the prospect of my own creativity. I am instead snared by Gmail and Outlook, hooked and then effectively stalled by mundanities that replace themselves upon my resolution.

I have work this afternoon, but the morning is mine. I have the morning to do with what I choose, but I have to be at work this afternoon. If I have to be at work by 2:00pm, then I should leave the house by 1:30pm and should be getting ready no later than 1:00pm. It is currently 7:00 am, which grants six hours at my disposal. I have six hours to maximize the joy and fulfillment of my day before clocking away for the evening. I have six hours to complete my errands, to tend to my cats, to clean my apartment, to be a human before going to work. I have a few personal tasks but nothing urgently pressing, so I decide to go to the gym and pick up my package from UPS on the way home.

I shut the laptop, down the last cold shot of coffee, and quickly get dressed. I embark on the trek through the parking lot to my car, and have just barely buckled my seat belt when I hear the notification ping through the speakers. The proximity of my phone to my car prompts the two devices to communicate, a conversation of which I am the subject. Together, they try to predict where I might be going, as to provide the convenience of assumed destination. This all takes about .5 seconds, for as soon as I’ve clicked the buckle I hear the GPS alert blare through. It is not the sound, but the announcement that I find aggressive: “14 minutes to Work. Traffic is light.” 

I am not going to work right now, but I feel a deep tension in the pit of my stomach reminding me of my ticking clock and limited time-frame. I start doing the math. It’s 7:30am and I am just now leaving; I’ll get to the gym by 7:45 and jump right onto a machine; I’ll stay for about an hour, and then will go to retrieve my package, which I can hopefully acquire by 9 o’clock. Best case scenario, I’m home by 9:15 am. I adjust my earlier math; I will still have a little less than four hours once I’m back home. Suddenly the morning doesn’t feel as free and open to potential, and even as my day is just beginning, I already feel the walls of an imposed schedule closing in on me. I feel sick. I start driving.

I make a sincere effort to black out and dissociate my way through an hour at the gym; I will enjoy it more if I can send my brain off to a fantasy land fueled by music and my eyes away from the clock. After the hour has come and passed, I find myself climbing back into my car. I plug the UPS store into my GPS to ensure I am taking the most expedient route, and even as I am actively using and directing my GPS elsewhere, I get that smug notification. Shouldn’t you be off to work? It’ll take you 21 minutes to get there because traffic is moderate, my car effectively commands – or is it the phone? I suppose it doesn’t matter which one is specifically condemning me to a perpetual shift, but more notable that this is the outcome of their programmed connection. I work quite often, but I go to the gym, grocery store, convenience store, gas station, train station, and my apartment with patterned frequency as well, yet I’m never prompted via GPS notification to go to any of these places. My work schedule is as inconsistent as anything else in my life, as they throw me on any shift that has a vacancy; last week I did a mixed bag of opening and closing, but this and next week I will close every night. All this is to inquire, if the predictability of my car travel is so inconsistent and varied, why then do my devices make the default assumption that I am always going to work?

I peer at the route to the UPS store – it was the way I would have taken even without GPS input – before exiting full out of the application in hopes of quieting my unhelpful assistant. I’m still not going to work yet, but it’s now 8:50 and I can feel the morning slipping through my fingers. I no longer have the early advantage and am well into the day, even closer to my death sentence for the night. I go and get my package, returning to my car and that probing notification once more. The ‘smart’ technology exposes itself as less than adaptable – why doesn’t it ever assume I am just going home?