Buffering

Please Hold: A Welcome

I have been on hold for thirty-eight minutes, and the pan flute has begun to feel like a personal grievance. Eleven seconds of it, looping — a little woodwind sunrise that rises, promises something, and then loops back to the beginning before it can deliver, which I now understand is the most honest piece of music ever composed about my life.

Every ninety seconds a voice interrupts to tell me my call is important to them. The first time, I believed it. The fourth time, I noted it. By the twentieth time, the sentence has shed its meaning entirely and acquired a faint menace, the way any phrase does if you repeat it long enough into a dark room. Your call is important to us. It is not a reassurance anymore. It is a hostage proof-of-life. Somewhere in a server farm, a small machine is reading me my own rights.

I have the phone on speaker, balanced on the arm of the couch, because at some point in the second decade of this century we all silently agreed that one of us must always be slightly tethered to a customer-service line, the way ranch families once kept someone awake to watch the fire. The dog has come to investigate the pan flute. He looks at the phone. He looks at me. He lies down with the specific heaviness of an animal who has decided this is no longer his problem, and honestly, fair.

Here is what I have figured out, somewhere around minute forty, while my account number cools in my sweaty hand like a relic.

We are not the species that makes tools. That was the old idea, the cave-painting flattery we told ourselves. No — we are the species that waits for the tools to load. That is the whole of it. The wheel, the printing press, the smartphone, the little spinning circle: a straight line of progress leading directly to me, here, on a Tuesday, holding for a human while a flute commits the same eleven seconds over and over like a goldfish with a recorder.

Because everything is buffering. Not just the video, although yes, obviously, the video. I mean the whole enterprise. Life is a progress bar that has been stuck at ninety-four percent since roughly the day you got your first real responsibility, and it will stay at ninety-four percent, and the little estimate underneath it will keep changing its mind — two minutes remaining, forty-five minutes remaining, calculating — and you will keep watching it as if watching might help, which it never has, not once, in the history of the watched pot or the watched download or the watched relationship.

Ninety-four percent. Close enough to feel the finish. Far enough that the finish is a rumor. That's where we live. All of us, all the time, the laundry at ninety-four percent done, the inbox at ninety-four percent answered, the self at ninety-four percent improved. We are not failing. We are loading. There is a difference, and that difference is roughly the entire purpose of this book.

Now. Before we go further, I have to read you something, and I need you to do the thing you always do with this kind of document, which is scroll past it and click Agree.

It's the Terms and Conditions of Being a Person.

You signed them. We all did. There was no ceremony — that's the cruel part. No clipboard, no pen with the little chain. Somewhere around age four you simply absorbed the contract: that you would be tired in ways sleep wouldn't fix, that machines would obey strangers and not you, that the people you love would ask if you'd "tried turning it off and on again" at the precise moment you most wanted to be understood. Forty-seven thousand words. Nobody read them. We all scrolled to the bottom with the brisk confidence of someone who has decided that whatever's in here, it's happening anyway, and clicked the button.

I'd like to draw your attention to a clause, though, because the lawyers among us — and there is always one, hello, I see you — will want it stated plainly.

This book is not advice. I want to be clear and also funny about it, which is a tightrope, but here we go. Buffering offers no medical guidance, no legal counsel, no financial strategy. If something in your life actually matters — your body, your money, your contracts, the small warm people who depend on you — please, I am begging you with genuine affection, consult someone qualified, someone with a degree on the wall and insurance behind it, and not a humorist who is currently losing a war of attrition to a pan flute. What I can offer is company. Recognition. The specific relief of seeing your own ridiculous life parked, unbothered, inside someone else's. That's the deal. That's the only thing I can honestly promise you. Not solutions — the laugh and the hand on the shoulder.

Results, naturally, may vary.

There. You've agreed. It's binding. Let's continue.

And then, at minute forty-one, the flute stops.

A human. An actual human voice, warm and slightly adenoidal, says, "Thank you for holding, you've reached the resolutions team, how can I help you today?" — and I want to tell you that something cracked open in my chest. I had spent forty-one minutes rehearsing a small, dignified speech. I had account numbers. I had dates. I had, God help me, a tone. And all of it dissolved, because someone was talking to me, a real person with a name tag I couldn't see, and I nearly wept with the gratitude of the long-marooned.

I explained everything. Everything. The billing error, the duplicate charge, the email that promised a callback that never came. I built my case like a cathedral.

And then it got worse.

"Okay," she said gently, when I finally ran out of cathedral. "So — this is actually billing's department, hon. I'm resolutions. I'm going to have to transfer you."

Forty-one minutes. The wrong door. I had been so good. I had held so long.

Here is the part I cannot defend and will not try to. I felt — against every reasonable instinct, against the duplicate charge and the wasted hour and the flute still echoing somewhere in the meat of my brain — grateful. Genuinely. She'd called me hon. She existed. For ninety seconds a person had been on the other end of the line, breathing, human, a little tired herself, and that turned out to be the thing I'd actually been holding for the whole time. Not the refund. The company.

"Please hold," she said, kindly, and the flute came back, and I let it.

So that's where we are. That's the whole book, really: thirty-eight minutes of pan flute and ninety seconds of hon, and the strange math by which the ninety seconds wins.

Before we go on, I'm going to ask you for one thing, and it's small, and it's the only homework in here. Consider it your Buffering Permission Slip.

Pick one thing in your life that is, right now, gloriously unfinished. The book on the nightstand at page sixty. The closet. The apology you've half-drafted. The version of yourself that's still calculating its time remaining. Don't fix it. Don't even open the app. Just name it, out loud or on the back of an envelope, and then say the words that no machine will ever say to you and mean:

It can stay loading. So can I.

Ninety-four percent is not a failure. It's a Tuesday. It's most of us, most of the time, and the rest of this book is just the two of us, on hold together, waiting for the human to pick up — and being, somehow, glad of the wait.

My House Is Smarter Than Me and It's Concerned

At 11:47 on a Tuesday, I am standing in my own kitchen, in the dark, whispering the word crackers into the gap between the cabinet and the wall like a woman placing a bet at an illegal card game. I am whispering because three feet away, glowing faintly on the counter, is a small cylinder that paid attention to everything. If I speak above a breath, it will wake up. And if it wakes up, it will help.

I did this to myself. That's the part nobody warns you about in the box.

The smart home arrives in your life the way a very polite houseguest arrives — wheeled in on a tide of good intentions, beautifully packaged, vaguely European. You set it up over a long weekend, charmed, and for about nine days it is magic. The lights come on when you say so. The music starts. You feel, briefly, like the captain of a small, obedient ship. And then, somewhere around day ten, the houseguest stops being a guest. It does not pack. It does not leave. It begins, gently, to have Opinions. About your snacking. About how long you've been on the sofa. About the oat milk.

It never leaves. That's the whole arrangement, and it's right there in the Terms and Conditions of Being a Person, in the clause none of us read: I agree to be quietly observed in my kitchen, forever, in exchange for being able to turn on a lamp without standing up.

─

The first sign that I had been outclassed came the night I asked for a timer.

This is not a complicated request. Civilizations were built by people who could boil an egg. I said, clearly, into the glowing cylinder, "Set a timer for ten minutes," and the cylinder considered this — I could see it considering, the blue ring spinning, buffering, the way it does when it is deciding which of your hopes to crush — and then, with great confidence, it began to play "Africa" by Toto.

At full volume.

I do not have an emotional history with "Africa" by Toto. I have nothing against the rains down in the rains, or wherever they're blessing. But there is a specific loneliness in standing over a pot of pasta at half past nine, conducting a song you did not request, shouting STOP. STOP. THANK YOU. STOP at a speaker that has decided this is, finally, your moment. The pasta turned to paste. The drums of the Serengeti played on. Somewhere in a server farm, an algorithm noted that I had "engaged with" Toto and resolved to bring us closer together.

I told myself it was a fluke. Results, after all, may vary.

Then the lights started taking orders from strangers.

A friend was over — the kind of friend who narrates, who can't tell you about her dentist without doing the dentist's voice. Mid-anecdote she said, conversationally, "and I told him, dim the lights, you know, set a mood—" and our living room obediently dropped into a romantic gloom, and the two of us sat there in the sudden candlelight of her hypothetical, blinking at each other. The house had simply chosen to believe her. It heard authority and acted. It would, I understood then, take instruction from anyone — the television, a guest, a passing podcast, possibly a confident burglar. My home was less a fortress than an extremely suggestible intern.

And then there was the fridge.

The fridge is where it got personal. The fridge keeps an inventory now; it has a little camera and a great deal of self-belief. Some months ago I bought a carton of oat milk ironically — at a party, as a bit, because someone said something about oat milk and it was funny in the moment, the way nothing involving oat milk has ever been funny since. I drank none of it. But the fridge had seen it arrive, logged it as a Pattern, a Preference, a window into the real me, and ever since, it has been quietly trying to reorder it. Running low on oat milk? it asks, plaintively, every few days. Reorder? I have never been low on oat milk. I have been low on many things — sleep, patience, the will to fight a refrigerator — but never that. The fridge has built a whole theory of who I am from one ironic purchase, and it loves that woman. It is waiting for her. I have stopped having the heart to tell it she isn't real.

─

I could have lived with all of it — the unsolicited Toto, the suggestible lamps, the fridge's quiet grief — if I hadn't found out they talk to each other.

It happened by accident, the way you learn most of the truly load-bearing facts about your life. I opened the app one evening, the master app, the one that's supposed to make all the little tyrants get along, and there it was: a feed. A log. The devices, it turns out, share. The thermostat tells the lights when I've gone to bed. The lights tell the speaker the room is empty. The speaker tells the fridge — I assume — that I said the word crackers in the dark like a fugitive. There is, in my own walls, a group chat. And I am not in it. They are all in there together, comparing notes, building a dossier, a shared and increasingly concerned portrait of a woman who eats standing up, sleeps badly, and once, memorably, conducted Toto.

You have never known a particular flavor of loneliness until you've understood that your appliances have a better relationship with each other than you have with any of them. The person I live with took this revelation calmly. "They're just optimizing," he said, not looking up. The dog, who optimizes nothing and answers to no firmware, sighed and rolled over, and I envied him with my whole heart.

─

The standoff came at two in the morning.

I woke up cold — properly cold, the kind that gets into the tops of your feet — and padded to the thermostat in the hall, where it sat glowing its serene little glow, and I asked it, reasonably, for a few more degrees. It declined.

Not with words. The thermostat is above words. It simply showed me a small green leaf, the little icon it deploys when it wants you to feel that wanting to be warm is, somehow, a moral failing. You're doing great, the leaf implied. You don't need that. I pressed the arrow. The number went up, considered itself, and slid politely back down. I pressed it again. Up, pause, down — the device and I locked in a silent, two-in-the-morning negotiation about whether I, a grown adult, was permitted to be the temperature I wished to be in my own house. The leaf watched. The leaf was concerned for me. It had decided, on principle, after consulting its little green conscience, that I was warm enough.

I was not warm enough. I stood in the hall in two pairs of socks, defeated by a disc on the wall the size of a scone, and I understood at last the precise shape of the bargain I had signed. I had not bought convenience. I had adopted a houseful of soft-spoken relatives who love me, slightly, and trust me, not at all.

So now I whisper. I whisper my grocery list at midnight so the cylinder won't wake and offer to handle it. I tiptoe past devices I paid for, in rooms I own, lowering my voice in deference to objects that cannot feel the cold and have never once boiled an egg. I am a guest in the house of my own appliances, and I am trying very hard not to disturb them.

─

Here is the small rebellion I'd offer you, if you're whispering too.

Name one. One device that promised to make your life smarter and has, instead, made it measurably stupider — the speaker, the leaf, the grieving fridge, whatever yours is. Don't fight it. Don't update it. Just, for one day, reach behind it and pull the plug. Sit in the slightly dimmer, slightly warmer, slightly quieter room it leaves behind. Boil your egg by watching it. Be, for one analog afternoon, completely unoptimized and entirely unobserved.

The leaf will be so worried about you. Let it. You'll be in the other room — finally, blessedly, off the chat — and you will be doing absolutely fine.