Two Months In
We’ve lived in our apartment long enough now for some of the initial organization to have loosened a bit. Our pantry looks a little less tidy. The stovetop isn’t quite as perfect-shiny. I’ve swept the floors enough now to know which corners the dog hair tends to settle in.
We’ve loosened a bit, too. Now we let our dog romp off-leash with us down the hall to the garbage chute: a 30 second burst of freedom that can keep him happy for hours. I’ve ridden down the elevator to the parking garage moments after rolling out of bed; force-of-nature hair be damned. We’ve watched a nail-biter movie on high volume without worrying that the neighbors would think the zombie apocalypse was starting in our apartment. Basically, we’ve moved off the eggshells of being apartment newbies. It feels more natural, and more homey, and more enjoyable for sure to not be as concerned with what our neighbors might be thinking or feeling about our behavior. But then again, I’m not sure we would ever know what our building’s fellow tenants are thinking or feeling.
Because so many of them don’t talk.
Because so many of them are looking at their phones.
Twenty six floors is a long time to ignore the other inhabitants in the building and stare at your screen. It takes a certain defiance; a bit of studied determination, to so consistently, and so intently, keep the eyes on the screen instead of on those around you. And yet there are a lot of people in our particular building who do this. Is it unique to our building? Likely not. Unique to Seattle? Likely not that, either. And yet, if not unique to Seattle, maybe elemental to it? Because downtown Seattle is not inexpensive, and professionals in the tech industry are, by and large, very well paid. Downtown is the location of Amazon and Facebook, with Google and Expedia nearby. We are in a veritable salad bowl of tech here, with the big leafy tech greens taking up most of the room, and home life and personal time perhaps just the croutons sprinkled on top; a bit of an afterthought.
At least that’s how it feels when you’re standing in an elevator with five others, dropping twenty seven floors, and you’re the only one who knows there are five others in the elevator. The elevator is well-lit, but the faces in the elevator are even more so, as they’re all aglow via their own personal rectangles of blue light. I have quite a few children and I know the pervasiveness and sneaky addictiveness of technology. I regularly put myself on social media sabbaticals in order to slow the slide into dependency. But I had never been in a situation before when so many people, over so many days, nearly every single time, were eyes-down-hands-up-fingers-tapping-earbuds-in.
My husband and children and I definitely skew the demographic in our building a bit. I’m approaching mid-century and my husband is past it. Most of our companions in the elevator, and therefore in our building, are of the late-20s to mid-30s age bracket. There are some our age or older, and there are some families with kids. But we’re the minority here. We’re outnumbered by these tech employees whose very skill-set is somehow related to the very thing they are currently on. If I could hold a typewriter or piano in my hands while I went about my day maybe I would, too. But, you know…no, I wouldn’t. Not really.
The other day I stepped into an already-full elevator on the ground floor. Surrounding me was silence, and glowing screens. A few floors up the elevator stopped and Don (not his real name), the Head of Custodial Services and Maintenance, worked his way in. The doors closed, the elevator began its ascent. Don, who was perhaps ten years older than I, saw me there and we greeted one another. Don and his crew had replaced our floors a few weeks earlier and we had chatted a bit. He was from Eastern Europe and had a son not much younger than mine. After our greetings there was a pause. Around us the heads remained bent; the screens continued to glow. There was the faint sound of thumbs tapping.
Don looked around in the same way I had, just a few floors below. There’s that elevator scan you do, to catch an eye; to make a quick observation that gives you a tiny hook needed to ask a question or make an observation. But when it’s heads-down-screens-on-earbuds-in there’s no hook: there’s no way to acknowledge others’ presence by acknowledging them. Have you ever said hello to an entire elevator full of people because you can’t find anyone with whom to individually engage? I have. And you feel just as silly as you might imagine, too. Not that it matters too much, because no one else has heard it. But there’s that desire to connect. To engage. And Don had it too, I could see. Because after a beat he caught my eye, and with the slightest inclination of his head and widening of his eyes, he communicated exactly what my daughter called “Mom’s Elevator Frustration:” Look at how well everyone ignores one another!
Was it Don’s role as a staff member of this building that made him sensitive to the anti-social nature of its occupants? Or was it his age? Was it his upbringing during a time when there weren’t any compelling handheld devices? My guess is both. And so, almost instantaneously, we began to carry on a real, true, bonafide conversation in our elevator of seven people. He asked how the new floors were holding up. I asked him about his son, who I remembered was struggling with math. We chatted and our voices sounded ever so loud, rude, almost, as if we were the only two people in the elevator and no one else was there. As if. But we continued on for the next ten floors or so, communicating. Occasionally one of our fellow occupants exited. Usually another took their place, looking remarkably similar to the departed: head bent and eyes on screen.
But near the end, just before Don reached his floor and departed, one of the people in the elevator looked up. He looked up and he took his earbuds out. He heard the tail end of our conversation. I remember thinking that I hoped he understood that talking in elevators is a good thing. It’s a nice way to pass the time. It’s an opportunity to connect. It’s a chance to learn something about someone that might allow you to converse with them again, more easily, the next time. I hope he took his earbuds off because he was listening; he was curious.
I think he might have taken them off, though, because whatever he was watching had ended. That’s what my gut tells me. But a big, perhaps a bit righteous part of me still hopes that he might have thought, “Ah! That’s how you do it.”
I wish I could talk to him about it. We’re here for at least a year. I’ll keep my eyes open for him. Maybe he’ll glance over, remove his earbuds, lower his phone and say, “Hi.”
It could start a revolution.
