There's No Getting Around Getting Around

Your morning commute: an unpleasant ordeal undertaken to arrive at a destination you'd rather not reach. There are the subway trains, like traveling in a tin can being kicked down a cobbled street by a one-legged man who falls over a lot; the roads, invariably gridlocked, or overrun by homicidal baboons driving mechanised rhinos down residential streets at ninety miles-per-hour; self-righteous cyclists with a overblown sense of environmental entitlement, priggishly claiming their inalienable right to pull wheelies on busy highways while weaving in and out of traffic at whim; and pushy, tunnel-vision pedestrians, oblivious to everything except whatever wretched donut shop beckons from across the way. It is little wonder that "Sorry I'm late" has replaced "Good morning" as the normal workplace greeting.

Personally, I long for the implementation of matter transporter commuting, not for reasons of speed or convenience, but because there will be much less human confrontation when we are all reduced to whizzing atoms. Of course, there is always the distinct and unfortunate possibility, however, that the matter transportation operators of the future will still be apathetic, resentful incompetents who hate their jobs, instead of highly-trained bio-engineering specialists wearing silver lab cloaks. It is easy to imagine, in such circumstances, that a commuter's head might materialise at his desk and torso in the lobby, while his arms and legs end up neatly stacked in a janitorial cupboard. The result will be even less productivity than today's world of physical delay and obstruction, that is, if we all still have jobs to go to then.

Comments

[Laurent]

Or, that by the umptieth hickup in the transporter's software your atoms become irreversibly merged with those of your colleague sitting opposite of you, now condemned to also spend all your time off with him for the rest of your life.

[Mike]

And worse yet, with his shrieking banshee of a wife.

[american fez]

The past was grim because there was too little technological innovation. The future will be grim because there will be too much.