Cyber sucker, total zero and human guinea pigs
Dear Rachel,
I don’t mean this to be political, but is the cyber truck (refuse to capitalize it) anything other than a social experiment in how much humans will sink into a relatively worthless thing for status? Yes it gets you where you’re going. (Unless it snows.) But it is not beautiful. It is not functional as a truck. I’ve seen one around and boy, the only status it conveys to me is “what a sucker.” Am I missing something?
– Drive-By Cyber Trucker
Dear Consumer Report,
I want to rag on the cyber truck (with or without capital letters). I really, really do. But I have to rag on trucks in general. Most new trucks I see nowadays have cabs bigger than the truck’s beds. Their sole purpose is to sit higher and take up more space, without actually being useful on friends’ moving days. I pine for the days of the indestructible Tacomas that I could never afford. No compensation for any lacking anatomy, no status except “damn I envy your truck still functioning after 20-some years.” When there wasn’t anything more American than a solid Japanese pickup.
– Keep on truckin’, Rachel
Dear Rachel,
Did you know that Gmail shows you a special icon when you get your inbox down to zero? Yeah, me neither, because what kind of psychopath gets their inbox down to zero? My supposed best friend showed me her accomplishment, and it made my throat go sour. I genuinely don’t know if I can stay friends with her. Can you give me one good reason to support friends with empty inboxes?
– Zero Hour
Dear Better Things to Do,
Everyone with an empty email inbox has one of two deep, dark, dirty secrets. The first is that they sort their emails into various folders, so the inbox is empty but the filing cabinet is stuffed. The second – the more frightening and enviable – id that they simply delete emails so they go far, far away and never have to be dealt with. This inspires me. Yet, I am the pass-agg emailer: if it ain’t in the first 1-50 of 12,784 emails, it’s just going to pressure me without actually being looked at ever again.
– 97% full, Rachel
Dear Rachel,
Human ingenuity in the kitchen will never fail to surprise me. Think of the steps needed to discover a good cup of coffee, for instance. The long, slow realization that a specific bean needs to be roasted, then ground, then steeped in hot water, then elevated with intense snobbery. Yet we as a species can’t seem to pay attention to anything outside our own heads for more than 10 seconds. How do we do it?
– Kitchen Confidential
Dear Gourmand,
Easy. We humans have a foolproof method for determining what betters us as a species and what doesn’t. We let other people try things for us. If they die, lesson learned! If they don’t, we might try it ourselves. Pretty sure this is what’s happening with cyber trucks.
– Making you stronger, Rachel
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