Oxymoron is one of my favorite words. We usually think of an oxymoron as a phrase, like ”army intelligence: or ”double solitaire”.
But the other day I saw an oxymoronic sight – phone jacks for a modem connection at every booth within a fast food restaurant.
The phone jacks are a signal from the restaurant owner to come on in, plug in your laptop, and stay awhile. But the fast food menu is a signal from the same owner to come on in, buy your food, and get out of here quickly.
Fast food is almost an oxymoron itself. The stuff served in a fast food restaurant can only barely be called food. In fact, the stuff may even be toxic. (Have you seen the documentary Super Size Me?
Some of the problems caused by the fast food industry, and our addiction to fast food, have been well documented. These include obesity, the “sameness” or “homogenization” of American culture, the dramatic (and negative) change in American agricultural practices, the filling of landfills with Styrofoam, etc., etc., etc. (Check out Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation or his Rolling Stones’ article Fast Food Nation: The True Cost of America’s Diet.
One doesn’t frequent fast food joints for the ambiance. Or for the quality of the food. Or to linger about.
One goes to a fast food joint for one reason – to get food fast! You can order fast, be served fast, and consume fast. (Actually, the correct adverb in the previous sentence was “quickly”, but I’m trying to go with the “fast food” theme here.)
To me, the phone jacks suggest something entirely different. Plugging in means pulling out the lap top, connecting your modem, checking your email, surfing the net. All of this takes time. For some, this is enjoyable, quality time. Even leisure time. It doesn’t make sense, at least to me, to do this at a fast food restaurant.
Maybe to others, it does make sense. This may be the ultimate in multitasking: eating fast food and checking your email at the same time – all in 15 minutes. This fast food restauranteur, indeed, caters to this obsession with multitasking.
I used to be reasonably good at multitasking. But I have begun to rebel against it. Perhaps it is a sign of getting older, but I prefer to soak things in one at a time. I notice more this way, and I enjoy life more as well. I suspect that, subconsciously, I began this website in order to force myself to absorb and reflect upon things a bit more.
It’s hard to do that when you are on-line checking email, talking on the cell phone, eating fast food, conversing with your dinner partner, and checking your calendar on Palm Pilot, all at the same time.
It may work for some people. But not for me.
More on Restaurant Modem Connections:
Restaurant modem connections does make sense for truckers. I’ve seen truck drivers plugged in at truck stops, but this is not multitasking. A multitasking truck driver would be checking his email while he is driving. Hopefully, there aren’t too many of these guys on the road. (If you are a trucker, see layover.com or datastop for a list of truck stops with phone or cable connections. (“Datastop existed in 2005, but does not in 2019.)
Recreational vehicle drivers might like this option as well, although more and more RV parks are modem friendly. Incidentally, if you want to see how quickly a website can be dated, check out For RV Park Owners: A Primer About Modem Friendly. (Yet again, this site existed in 2005 but no longer.) This was written in 1999 and is intended to be a guide for RV park owners – it deals with things like phone jacks in telephone booths and use of fax lines for modem connection.
Update: This 2005 posting reminds me of how quickly dated any posting about technology becomes. I mean, “phone jacks”? Really? Can you imagine multiple phone jacks today? And did you catch my earlier reference to a “Palm Pilot”. What the heck is that?