Working from home turns out to be... work. A question that could have been shouted over the top of a cubicle divider and answered in 10 seconds turns into an e-mail thread as long as the works of Proust. Reply All. There’s no going “out” for lunch – which should be good for our waistline if we weren’t “in” all day raiding the refrigerator. One of these days, consumers are going to realize that Amazon is just a Sears and Roebuck The whole household is underfoot. The kitchen sink is the water cooler, but the kids don’t have any good gossip and flirting with the dog is pathetic. Furthermore, there’s no 9 to 5... Coworkers are scattered around time zones and across the International Date Line. When it’s time for an after-work drink in New York, it’s already tomorrow morning in Singapore. Plus, drinking alone is also pathetic. Which brings me to the one upside of working remotely – no one can smell your breath in a Zoom meeting, so I fill my entire coffee mug with scotch. As for the future of retail... One of these days, consumers are going to realize that Amazon catalogue that can’t be repurposed in the outhouse. is just a Sears and Roebuck catalogue that can’t be repurposed in the outhouse. Then, somebody’s going to get a bright idea... “What about a place where you can buy things?” A place where the things you want to buy are there already. A place where you
can look things over, try them out, and get information about what’s for sale from helpful “salespersons” – real people who are actually, physically present. You can try on clothes, see if they fit, and find out how you look in them (even from the back due to these places having special three-way mirrors). No more UPS trucks running over your dog. No more using the nail file to try to open boxes sealed with miles of shipping tape, which then spill Styrofoam peanuts all over the house. No more disappointed exclamations of, “What the hell is this? It’s six sizes too small and the color of baby puke.” No more packing it back up and waiting for the UPS truck to run over your dog again. If you don’t like an item at the place where you can buy things, you can just leave that item there and pick out something else because this place has lots of other items in storage. Let’s call the place... Oh, I don’t know, a “store.” And city dwellers buying a house may find that they’re getting more than they bargained for. Many years ago, I had a first wife. She was a confirmed urbanite whose idea of the outdoors was the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. In the 1980s, she and I moved to my house in rural New England. The furnace went out. My first wife took a big metal soup ladle from the kitchen and began banging it on a radiator. “What are you doing?” I said. She said, “I’m calling the man.” I said, “What man?” She said, “The man who comes and fixes things.” I said, “The who?” She said, “You know, the building supervisor man who lives in the basement.” (My first wife has returned to living in the city.)
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December 2020
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