Progress

 

 As a little kid, I was astonished by elevators. The first time I remember using one I was with my grandparents. We walked into a bank lobby filled with tall counters, scattered seating areas, potted plants, and walls lined with office doors. The department we needed was on another level so we were told to take the elevator. We turned and walked into a windowless metal box, and I watched wide-eyed as the giant door closed us in.

I had no idea what was about to happen, and I gripped my grandpa’s hand tightly while I counted to ten. When the door opened, all the furniture had been moved. All the people were swapped out for new ones. Even the carpet was a different color. And that’s when I figured out how elevators work.

Magic.

It all happened so fast! While we stood behind a metal door for ten seconds, a bunch of people rearranged the entire room. And when it was time to go home and we got back inside the elevator again, they put everything back the way it was before. Kind of exhausting, if you ask me.

In a sense, elevators are like time machines. While you sing along to ‘elevator music’ that was chart topping when you were a teenager, that box you’re standing in moves you between realities, all with the push of a button. It happens so fast! Push a button in a mall elevator, and suddenly the smell of Cinnabon floats in from a food court. Wave goodbye to a hotel lobby and when the door slides out of the way, a swimming pool magically appears. Wait a little longer for the door to open inside a skyscraper's elevator, and when you step out, you’ll be dodging pigeons.

There’s no end to the possibilities! Look at all the progress we can enjoy just so we don’t have to climb so many stairs.

Could we please stop? I can’t keep up with how fast the furniture keeps changing.

Progress has altered the way we function in the world. But, just like elevators, there’s a little glitch with the way it behaves. It moves so quickly, I'm in a daze. Cable is out, streaming is in. Venmo is in, checkbooks are out, just like cash. I picked up lunch at Taco Bell today and when I paid for it, the teenager in the window thanked me profusely for giving him exact change. Which, I know from previous experience, means he was terrified of breaking down a ten-dollar bill on his own. Pretty sure that isn't progress.

Then there’s transportation. A few things have changed since I learned to drive. No longer do I have to crank my own window up and down. Now I just push a button and watch it go. I don’t need a road map anymore because I have a Siri. And, thanks to the camera on my dashboard, now I can watch in real time while I back into somebody’s bumper.

Also, I can count on one hand the number of kids I see who actually pedal their own bikes in my neighborhood unassisted. The rest of the horde ride eBikes. Saints preserve us. Electric bikes are about to make me lose my mind. Watching out for them in my peripheral when I’m on the open road is the equivalent of dodging mosquitoes at a Florida picnic in July. They’re everywhere and they’re deadly.

Here’s the thing about eBikes. You don’t need a license to ride one on a busy street. All you need is an eBike. You don’t have to obey traffic laws or signal your intentions or look both directions before you pull out in front of an old person who thinks driving her car into a canal would be a fun way to spend the afternoon. Most eBikers don’t bother with helmets, either.

Scooters have gone electric, too. And skateboards. And unicycles. Unicycles! I saw one lit up like a Christmas tree last year and thought I was a having a close encounter of the third kind. But that’s not the most alarming thing. All of these modes of transportation can travel between twenty and twenty-eight mph on sidewalks and in bike lanes and on surface roads. So far I haven’t seen them on the freeway but I’m pretty sure that’s coming.

And I used to think normal traffic was stressful.

Then there’s Waymo, the autonomous vehicle with a giant, spinning donut on its roof. Here in the desert, driverless cars are multiplying like rabbits. One of them even tried to follow me home this week. Unnerving. I’ve heard they do that in cul-de-sacs sometimes, entire herds of them. Instead of returning to the mother ship to await their next mission, they stage in dead end streets, circling all their station wagons like they’re about to be attacked by hostile natives. That’s a strong possibility, too, considering their self-imposed traffic jams make it impossible for locals to leave their own garages.

I don’t know when we gave up using people power to propel ourselves around, but maybe it was when Mr. Ford saw the Wright Brothers fly through the sky and thought to himself, “Hey! I like the idea, but with some modifications.” Of course, I could have that backwards.

All I know is Grandma never had to deal with this kind of stuff. Of course, Grandma never had a driver’s license, either. Still, now that I’m one of millions of boomers trying to keep up with technology while my eyesight slowly gives way to cataracts, is this really a good time to release robot cars of any kind on an aging society? Just asking.

I shouldn’t have asked. I’m betting you’ve got your own frustrations with most, if not all, of the machines I just described. But there’s another one I just ran across. Not literally. Nearly, but, well, let me explain.

I’ve seen them a few times, but I’m still not used to them. I was about to pull out of a strip mall driveway onto a busy street a few days ago when something weird caught my eye. A flash of red showed up in my periphery. It looked like a giant vegetable headed straight for me and, for a second, I thought Return of the Killer Tomatoes was a real thing. I mean, it could have been, if I’d pulled out in front of it. I definitely would have squashed that rolling red tomato.

It was doing twenty mph in the bike lane. Everything clogging up the highways now runs at twenty mph. I’m barely used to looking for kids on scooters and electric bicycles, and now I have to keep an eye out for rotund red robots, too. Just like its Waymo cousin, this one was unmanned and automated. But unlike Waymo, it had big eyes on the front of it. Big LED eyes! Funny, friendly eyes that moved to and fro, like a character that just escaped from the movie, Cars, and couldn’t find its way back.

I mean, come on. I can’t take much more of this. Our streets are turning into cartoons. What’s next? Waymo fire engines and police vehicles? Bucktooth pickup trucks and muscle cars that flirt with volkswagons? How many hot wheels are going to clog the streets before I wave a white flag and start calling for an Uber?

I didn’t know what the heck I was dealing with, so when I got home I looked it up. They’re the brainchild of Door Dash, and each rolling automaton is called “Dot.” Appropriate, since that’s all that would be left if my Tahoe had run over it. Inside their bulbous selves they can carry up to six pizzas and presumably a small, hungry child. I’m just guessing about the pizzas. Apparently, they fill a niche in the Phoenix area market where hungry homeowners and businesses alike take one look at their outside thermometers and think to themselves, “That’s robot weather out there. I’m calling in for take-out delivery.”

The company’s website gushes about their desire to lean into electric vehicles because they reduce emissions and traffic congestion. Not so fast. If I’d run over the dang thing, like I came close to doing, there would have been increased traffic congestion just from Looky Lou’s standing in the street, laughing. In my opinion, the only way to make a Dot safe is to make it a lot more visible. Instead of being 1/10th the size of a car, they should have supersized it, just like the hamburger and soda it was carrying.

All this to say, now when I get out on the open road around here, I don’t have time to watch for other cars. I’m too busy protecting myself from electric skateboarders, electric scooters, disoriented driverless cars, eBikes, and delivery units with glandular problems, when all I wanted to do was escape my house and pick up a salad.

I don’t know how to handle all these changes. I’d blame it on progress, but I think it’s really the fault of elevators. If I close my eyes, could all the magical people please put the furniture back the way it was before? 

Yeah, I didn't think so. 

I should have never left the ground floor.

**Seen above, actual image of a convoy of rolling tomato dots. 

    It's getting weird out there.