Where Are You? When Are You?

Even the smallest incident -- or the observation of it -- can have broad implications, especially with a little input from others.

Earlier this week, I placed the following post on my Facebook wall about an incident at one of the dozens of Starbucks in downtown Portland:

I was waiting at the bar for my coffee drink. I could see my cup exactly and could tell when it was due, right after the smaller cup destined for the young woman beside me who had ordered just before me. "I have a tall latte," the barista said as she put it on the bar. "Tall latte," she repeated. The girl next to me looked up and asked "tall latte?" as she reached for it. The barista nodded and the girl walked away. "Do you think if you'd said it three times, she would have heard it?" I asked the barista. She gave me a jaundiced shrug.

It’s the sort of slice of urban life that normally might pass without comment, or receive a couple of “ain’t it the truth” comments in agreement. Somewhat to my surprise, however, several of my Facebook friends posted cautionary warnings and a spirited discussion ensued.

One friend, who has impaired hearing and is so expert at understanding others by reading their lips that most people don’t know about her condition or easily forget it’s the case, suggested the customer next to me might have been deaf.

Another person responded to the discussion of what constitutes “attentiveness” by saying, partly tongue in cheek, I’d guess, that the woman might have been in the process of achieving a great insight into how the final stanza of her poem in progress should end.

These differing interpretations of the incident stemmed in part from the fact that I had reduced my description to its climax to make a short and fairly simple Facebook post. But my reading of that moment at the coffee bar had been colored by many other observations over the preceding five minutes I had spent behind or next to the young woman.

When I had walked into the place, another patron or two was just completing his order at the cash register. The young woman in question was next, with a companion, and they were talking animatedly in a limbo of space between the food display case and the registers -- clearly unsure of what to order. They were also consulting their smartphones about something or other.

I could have brushed past them; I knew exactly what I wanted and could have placed my order and moved on before they came to a decision. But I waited patiently behind them.

When she got to the register, the girl -- I call her this because she was tiny, Oriental, and looked to be no more than 22 -- asked the cost of a “tall” versus a “grande” coffee. After hearing the cashier quote the relative prices, she decided on a tall. She was well dressed, and armed with electronics as I mentioned earlier, so she was probably not poor; just short of cash.

After I arrived at the register and made my order, I had time to choose a table across the room and place some of my things there before returning to the bar to await my drink. There was no one else standing there but the young woman and me … no one else apparently waiting for a drink.

I could readily tell which was her “tall” coffee and which was my “grande” in the larger cup, though the barista was preparing them both pretty much simultaneously. Since I had my eyes on my cup and the barista, I can’t honestly say what the girl was doing while standing next to me … whether she was peering at her smartphone again or not.

And that’s when the brief exchange I described in my Facebook post occurred.

Now, it’s unlikely she was deaf because she had carried on conversations with both her friend and the cashier. Moreover, a deaf person would likely have been more attentive, and arrived at the same conclusions about the cups as I had by mere observation. If she had any experience of Starbucks at all, she could probably have turned the cup and seen and recognized the shorthand description that cashiers usually write on the drink in felt-tip Sharpie pen.

At the register, the customer could also have figured out the relative prices of tall and grande cups by studying the boards and not having to ask the cashier. But she had not bothered to do any of these things, perhaps because she was accustomed to having other people do everything for her.

I have no firm evidence to rule out the theory that she was deep in thought about some grand creative project, but I’d say the odds are against it simply because of its statistical unlikelihood: few people write poems these days -- few ever did, actually -- and when they do, they’re probably not wrestling with them in public.

I regard my interpretation of the situation as more likely because I see countless examples of similar inattention everywhere, all the time, for example:

• Drivers who operate as if all that matters is the 20 to 30 feet in front of their grill, as if bicyclists and pedestrians don’t exist
• Pedestrians who continue to stream along the crosswalk after the light says “don’t walk,” heedless of the fact that they’re holding up vehicles who have patiently waited their turn for previous pedestrians
•  Cashier/servers who are so used to operating on autopilot and entering orders piecemeal that they’ll either ask what else you want after you’ve “helpfully” told them your entire order, or simply drop the second or third item because they didn’t bother to listen to your entire order
• Transit riders who leap up wildly from their seat on the streetcar or light rail train and either just make it through the doors or miss their stop altogether because they were absorbed in their electronics
•  Drivers who don’t press the accelerator when the light turns green, and sometimes elicit a honk from the car behind them, because they’re texting or studying something on their smartphone
• Texters who stop in the middle of the crosswalk and block the path of others instead of stepping to one side; who pause to do their essential websurfing on a corner and thereby befuddle the drivers who need to turn across their path and don’t know whether they may do so

This kind of self-centeredness, inattention, and blinkered vision makes the world a less civil place; it increases general stress and mishaps. Most of the examples we’re talking about are minor, but could easily turn deadly.

We’ve all heard of drivers who mowed down a pedestrian, smashed into an oncoming vehicle, or killed their passengers in a single-vehicle accident because they were fiddling with a smartphone or talking on their mobile.

Routine and ritual can be comforting, but the more they encourage a person not to think about his actions, or fail to be fully in the moment, the more risky they become. On Thursday, a 38-year-old Intel employee stepped momentarily out of his routine by agreeing to take his six-month-old daughter to a doctor’s appointment before dropping her off at day care.

He did the first; he did not do the second, but returned to his daily routine and drove on to work and left her in the car, in the parking lot, for the next six hours. In the heat of a moderately warm October day, she was dead by the time he got out of work at 5 p.m.

As of this writing, none of the principals in this incident have been named, and there’s no word of any charges. This is the 29th American child to die in this fashion this year. In a typical year, three dozen small children die when a parent forgets to take them out of the car.

Despite all our lovely gadgets and tools, it has become no less challenging to discipline oneself to live in the present moment. In fact, it may have grown harder than it ever has been.