Exit. I Oblige

In Beijing, I am generally a passenger for any distance greater than a mile.  This is as it should be.  It’s an aggravating driving environment with clogged drain traffic always and if I’m not driving I can do other things, like write.  

Driving in the Bay it will need to be me that gets me, from here to there.  I plug in my iPhone to charge in and suddenly the dashboard lights up inviting my to use my phone and an inexplicable selection of apps up on the touch screen in front of me.  Skype No.  QQ Yes.  Why?  I use the GPS service from my iPhone.  Now it’s rendered tastefully in front of me   Within minutes I’m dependent on it and adhere to its every suggestion.  

I need to get up to Oakland from Sunnyvale.  I’ve planned the day to get out of Sunnyvale by 4:30PM.  I decide to sit tight in the car and just do my 5:00PM call there in the parking lot.  Bravely, eventually,  I decided to talk and drive.   My only concern was that the driving app would voice-over the conf call while I was speaking.   I was largely done and I set up with a basic capacity to mute / unmute while driving to be something I could handle.  

The navigation app took me up the east side of the Bay.  It’s easier to loose reference here, driving up beyond for example, Hayword.  If you’re in Palo Alto and you need to get to Sanata Clara you know implicitly how many exits, how many corporate complex, you’ll need to pass before you get there.  Up from Fremont the GPS announces that I can save ten minutes and get off at the next exit.  I oblige.

And it is important to do this for all of a sudden you’re driving through a community that you have very little knowledge of.  There is a street to a corner to a turn to a boulevard with people’s homes.  There is a familiar Bay Area mix of moist green poverty, lacerated with wealthy totems just about everywhere.  "Who would you like to have me call?" asks the voice.  

Later I take a call on Skype and am not so deft with my muting.  The tart British voice told me and eight other people to “veer left on to Rodeo Real”  “Sorry everyone.  That was me.  I’ll mute.  Sorry.”  And it’s really, slow going through this roughened suburban slice until suddenly the proprietor throws the aeration tube back in the turgid aquarium and the water becomes oxygenated.  Now we swim fast and the traffic moves so that salmon can be proper seventy mile per hour sockeye swimming up to my Park Ave exit