Working Outside Sucks
This blog was a nice reminder of something I get tempted to do, especially in the summer: go to a cafe and work on a patio.
Where do you even start, man. Why is every cafe outfitted with the worst chairs in the United States? Why is the WiFi completely sundered when more than three Macbooks connect to it? I’ve probably spent entire days of my life watching Google Docs attempt to load while “Songbird_Guest” heaves and chugs. Isn’t it cool how every time you press the spacebar your latte wobbles perilously on the table? These factors are consistent across every one of my attempts to work outside since Covid made landfall, and I completely forget about them until the very moment I’m baking in the sun, smashing the refresh button, wondering how I keep falling for it. We’ve finally uncovered an employment experience more dehumanizing than the average office, and it can be found in the coffee shop grottoes across the country.
Bringing a hulking work laptop is a non-starter: it’s tablet computer (with their brighter, better screens) or nothing. What you’re doing on has to function offline. And it also has to be okay if you end up doing very little of the work you intended to. That’s why the cafe is for first-draft writers, note-takers, doodlers. It’s not for the cranking.