Magic!
I’m on an Amtrak train with free WiFi. In the pantheon of cool places to have WiFi, it’s not as cool as having WiFi on a plane, but it’s much cooler than being forced to stare out the window of an Amtrak train and seeing New Jersey.
There’s a businessman in his mid-60s sitting next to me typing on an HP laptop with a screen so large it was once used as the Jumbotron in Shea Stadium. He’s using an actual mouse. I wonder if he knows he has a touchpad. Ok, that’s neither here nor there.
Louis C.K. has that famous bit where he talks about a dude next to him on a plane complaining about the slow WiFi. Louis berates him for being a privileged asshole. I laugh at that bit because I identified with the privileged asshole.
But today? Today, the roles were switched.
The old businessman turned to me:
“Is it just me or is this Internet slow?” he asked, smiling. He put his hands up in the air as if to say, “Why me? Why am I cursed with the wonder of the Internet on this godforsaken train?”
I took off my headphones.
“It’s not bad. It’s free internet. On a train,” I said, and smiled back.
He turned back to his computer shaking his head.
It felt so good I had to say it again.
“The internet! On a train!”
He didn’t turn back to look at me when I said it a second time, but he must’ve known I was smiling when I said it.
