The need for speed

There was a prescient scene involving tacos on “Master of None,” a scripted series by actor/comedian Aziz Ansari and writer Alan Yang that premiered on Netflix in November.

Ansari plays Dev, a first-generation American who is following in the grand tradition of TV 20-somethings past by living in a huge apartment he cannot possibly afford in New York City.

Having been bestowed all of the luxuries and conveniences of the modern era by parents who scrimped, saved and sacrificed to place him in a prime position in the land of opportunity, Dev is far from liberated.

Instead he finds himself suffocated by all of the options at his disposal and the pressures of living in a world where’s it’s possible to spend 45 minutes disappearing down a rabbit hole of Yelp reviews and informal Facebook polls looking for the city’s best taco.

And really, in this day in age, why settle for second best?

A couple of weeks ago, the Centre Daily Times stopped publishing movie times in Weekender. Some readers have phoned in to express their disappointment. Others just wanted to know when they should arrive for the next showing of “The Choice.”

People far better than I answer those phone calls. I’m usually hovering somewhere in the background attempting to find an almond I dropped on the floor before the five-second rule kicks into effect.

From what I gather, some of the people on the other end of those lines have made a purposeful decision either not to own a computer or not to connect whatever device they have at their disposal to the Internet, where movie times are readily available on Fandango or Google.

It is a perfectly valid lifestyle choice that I admittedly struggled to understand at first.

Job applications, rental agreements, even car shopping — so much of it is now done online, mostly because it’s just faster that way.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column about the pervasive nature of technology and I’m going to do my best not to belabor those points again here, suffice to say that the world seems to be on the verge of becoming a place where it will be increasingly difficult to pretend that technology is something that can be opted out of with a note from home, like a flu shot or gym class.

I know this because I work at a newspaper and regardless of the implications presented by the last two syllables hanging over that word, it would be difficult in a business built on the speed and reliability with which you can deliver the facts, to turn a blind eye toward anything that was labeled “the information superhighway.”

And I don’t always love that, by the way. I’m not great off-the-cuff, the guy who is always ready with the perfectly distilled tweet or the snappy Facebook post. I maintain that every first date that I have ever been on would’ve gone smoother if I had been given the opportunity to sit at my computer beforehand and type out everything I was going to say after hours of contemplative navel gazing.

The prospect of applying that level of scrutiny — that level of energy — to every non-interaction I have over the Internet is exhausting.

This is the job, though, and I don’t get to opt out. I mean, I could, but that would probably involve a career writing travel brochures somewhere and I have a feeling that once you’ve written about your first Disney Cruise, you’ve written about them all.

But it was in thinking along those lines that I started to understand.

By now you’ve probably guessed the denouement of that scene in “Master of None,” where Dev, having spent three-quarters of an hour searching for the perfect taco on his phone, arrives at a small food truck.

It’s after 1 p.m. and the last taco is already gone, probably snatched up by one of the many people who just happened to be walking by on their way to a life.

This story was originally published February 14, 2016 at 12:32 AM with the headline "The need for speed."