Commodity to Necessity

You’d think I’d be happy. It’s Friday. I’m right on track with my work, running through reviews of ID: FC and RE and getting those off my desk. Today, Agents of Oblivion awaited me. Or did it?

No. Technological issues with my phone yesterday evening cascaded through today and I went sprawling headfirst down a Kafkaesque pathway of despair, desolation, and aggravation with unrelenting pain and torment. When you wonder what I draw upon to create scenes of moral ambiguity and unreasonable dilemmas, you can be certain I have gone to the deep well of  customer service issues more than once.

I now have a phone. So peace has been restored to the valley. It’s amazing how dependent we are all on phones today. Allow me to share one vignette with you before we part ways. When I didn’t have my phone, I went to use a pay phone. They are scarcer than hen’s teeth and it took driving around for about ten minutes before I found one and then I had to get change (luckily, I had real world bills instead of just cred-sticks), and make my calls. All the phones have been vanishing without anyone noticing. We all have phones within feet of us–friends, family, whatever–if not on our person, so it was weird to need to make a call and have no immediate access to it. We are spoiled by our creature comforts, but I’m certain a kernel of a story exists where someone is suddenly deprived of something to only realize it’s been disappearing from the rest of the world all along and somewhere along the line the item in question has crossed the ambiguous line from commodity to necessity. Food for thought, my fellow travelers.

Until next time, I bid you, dear reader, adieu.