I have a post waiting to come out me about the tyranny of email. I’ve concluded that the more emails you get, the less successful you are. Some people (insecure people) think that it means that you’re busy and important, but in fact, it means the opposite. It means that you are doing a lot of administrative work, and no one is afraid to bother you with minutiae. This is something that almost everyone who reads emails has concluded. But lately, I find myself chained to my desk, feeling just as imprisoned as I used to when I worked in an office. And I’ve realized that it’s because I’m spending 4 or 5 hours a day responding to emails.
On a positive note, however, I’d like to share a New York story.
Yesterday, I was driving home from lunch with my friend Greg Fay, who was in town for the weekend. Just before I reached home, I pulled into a gas station, where a Hassidic man driving a…minivan almost backed into me as he attempted a 16 point turn in empty space. There was no need for such maneuvering. It is my conclusion that he was either blind or afraid to drive back out onto the street.
At this point, I was fairly annoyed. Driving in the city is, in my humble opinion, mostly a nightmare. Either you feel like your life is in peril, or you’re stuck metaphorically slamming your head against the windshield every three feet because a car cuts you off, or the light turns yellow at the end of the street. I frequently find myself screaming at handicapped vans or school buses. “Drive faster, you fucking idiot!”
Driving can also make you very prejudiced. “I knew you were a middle-aged Latino lady with your sister in the front seat,” I’ll scream at a slow moving car. “Chinese!” I’ll scream at a gigantic white truck that looks like it might collapse at any minute. One of the best things about New York is that you never know what you’re gonna get when you’re screaming “Ass Clown!” as you speed up to peer into another car’s driver’s seat.
After the Hassidic Jew incident, I had really had enough of driving for the day. So imagine my dismay as I turned down the narrow road perpendicular to my own — so close! — only to have traffic slow down to a snail’s pace. “That better not be a UPS truck!” I yelled, hysterically.
Suddenly, however, the cars started peeling off to the side of the street. I made my way through the cleared channel, bewildered. At the light, a very old woman in a motorized wheelchair was stopped in the middle of the street, reaching for a plastic bag.
Something that should be clarified about motorized wheelchairs in New York is that the people who drive them are generally demons. Who else in their right mind would zip the wrong way down the street in a death trap? If I came face to face with one while I was driving down a one-way street, and couldn’t move past, I would have a conniption and die of a heart attack. And the demon would throw back their head and start maniacally laughing as they pushed the lever forward and drove over my body like it was a fucking speed bump.
But still, there is no kind hearted person who could, with good conscious, see an old lady in a wheelchair struggling for a bag of groceries, and not help her. I figured no other type of New York driver would stop.
I passed her on my right, and then pulled over in front of a fire hydrant. Through my rearview mirror, I saw that throngs of other cars had done the same. Driver’s doors were opening on all sides of the street. Puerto Rican men and stroller moms and livery lunatics and Asian ladies were pouring out into the intersection, all to help this poor old lady recover her bag.
It made me smile, because it was a New York moment. In our incredibly diverse city, the gut reaction of every individual in his or her own car, without any guidance from the group as a whole, stopped to chip in. Realizing that there wasn’t much I could do, I opted against getting out myself. Instead, I made my way down the now empty path, and was home within three minutes.
