Watched Pots

The ability to track (like packages in transit) is a mixed blessing. It’s great to know what’s going on but it can also drive you (or, is it just me?) crazy. I ordered a sporting good last week and have been wearing out the keyboard tracking its crawl across the country. This is partly my doing in that I seek the best price and that often involves buying clearance from some trout fishing shop in Montana or similar situation. Of course, closer isn’t always better. There are mail order warehouses in the immediate area but the goods get shipped far and wide before they finally return to here because of the vagaries of the respective systems. That can be exasperating. My worst experiences in this area involved my travels to the Pacific Rim when I was in the product development business. My usual flight reached Singapore via Minneapolis and Tokyo, taking about 23 hours. On the headrest in front of you was a screen of about 2.5” x 3”. If you didn’t care to watch the insipid movie twelve times, you could track the flight progress. A map of the hemisphere appeared with the plane represented by a red dot. On that scale, movement of the dot wasn’t discernible. By hour fifteen, I was silently screaming and cursing at it to do so. A watched pot never boils, but I can’t help but watch it.