I’ve just made an impact on the real world.
It’s pouring today. Only the most fearless Grab drivers are out there, and there aren’t many. On top of that, most restaurants seem to be closed anyway. That being said, my lunch options today were rather limited.
So I decided to embark on an adventurous expedition and prove to myself and everyone else I was tough enough to source my food without relying on big tech’s sprawling network of underpaid drivers.
There was one restaurant around the corner where I ate many times before but it seemed to be closed according to Google Maps. But after a prompt application of my advanced internet usage skills, I managed to find one beachfront restaurant that was marked as open on the world-leading map service and seemed to have comforting curry options much needed in a damp, cool climate.
A hard choice of whether to take a bike or stretch out my legs and walk was decided in favour of the latter. Besides most likely being the only exercise for today, it presented an opportunity to use an umbrella and have a shot at staying relatively dry for the feast.
Even though my medium-sized turquoise-and-white striped umbrella had a sizeable hole right above my head, the adventure was going well at first. Streams of fairly transparent rainwater were rushing downhill. Shallow at first, lower than the height of my footsoles. A side effect of me starting at top of the hill where my hotel is located.
As I was making my way down the road, the stream got deeper and wider. Zigzagging from one side of the road to another, it was evidently trying to find the most optimal trajectory. The thought occurred to me: should the rain continue forever, our descendants might have to build a bridge or two here in a few hundred years. And the influencers of the future — whatever form they might be in — might be coming here to take pictures in front of a jungle waterfall. Thinking with empathy and amusement about the people of my generation who had to cook or endure lengthy ordeals of going to restaurants and waiting to be fed to sustain their life. They, the happy, civilised folks of the future have a chip embedded in them that releases all the required nutrients automatically. They don’t have to dedicate a quarter of their life to eating or thinking about what to eat or sourcing ingredients.
And here I am, the representative of civilised peoples of today, navigating this impromptu body of water, thinking about how good I have it, not having to hunt down a zebra with fellow men of culture or spending half a day picking up berries only to end up having a destructive diarrhea because my plant identification app got it wrong. I only have to survive a 10-minute walk under a fairly heavy rain, and I will be fed.
The situation got worse as I turned down from the main road and was making my way through a luxury hotel as a shortcut to the beach, gave a friendly nod to the security man of the hotel trying to signal I belonged here and did not have to be turned away. Either the rain intensified or it figured out a more optimal way of getting me wet — just as the rainwater was optimising its curves on the main road.
My shorts were already wet. The good thing is that my destination was already a few metres away, and that my tote bag with an iPad and a book was still miraculously untouched by the tropical rain.
The bastion of last hope turned out to be closed, too. With white wooden chairs and tables moved away from the ocean and tied with a rope, and the main pavilion covered with a plastic curtain.
The ocean had a not particularly appealing dark-green-mixed-with-sand colour and, even though, the waves were about waist-high, it looked powerful.
I thought it wouldn’t make sense to turn back after coming such distances, so I decided to press on and try to source food at a coffee shop down the main road I come to almost daily. My girlfriend went there earlier this morning and said it was now basically located in the middle of the Danube. Like houses of those medieval tax dodgers who would build their home literally in the middle of a river to avoid land taxes. That’s how I imagined it.
It wasn’t far, just a few more hundred metres across damp, packed sand. My holed umbrella stopped making sense at this point and I might as well have taken the bike. I was officially defeated by the weather’s smart rain direction changing system. They might have achieved AGI up there.
To my disillusionment, there was no Danube on the main road. The coffee shop stood on a perfectly concrete road. I stepped over the stream not bigger than uphill where I started, and entered the coffee shop.
Bespectacled young guy with dyed red hair greeted me with a smirk and asked if it was just me. Upon receiving an affirmative nod, he pointed at a small table by the bar. I smiled and clarified I was drenching wet and would prefer one further away from the AC that was blasting 16° Celsius, unchanged from the previous sunny, hot days. He understandingly pointed at another table at the back of the room. The biggest of them all — the very same table I was chased away from when I tried to sit there by myself the other day.
Now I had it all to myself. As I sat down, trying to mount my umbrella against the chair, I noticed him turning up the AC to 22°C. As I started writing this note, he went even higher — to 25°C. At that point, not only was I surprised but probably even the AC itself as I doubt it’s even been told to function at such scorchingly-hot temperatures in this place.
That was the impact I unintentionally unleashed today on a few dozen people in the coffee shop.