I was recently issued a new computer at my job. The one it replaced was a hand-me-down from someone more senior than me, and I’d had it for almost five years, so it was a bit of an antique. The new machine is brand new. It is also noticeably slower than the old one.

Not only is the machine slow, but its mouse is poorly designed. Left-click is a tiny portion in the corner, right-click is approximately 99.99999999% of the surface. It’s like the Cosmic Calendar in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos,  where the whole of human history is an infinitesimal square at the end representing the last couple of seconds before midnight on the night of 31 December. 

So it’s frustrating to have to use the thing. I find myself doing a lot more work at home now so that I don’t have to fight with it.

Anyway, one day I left my office to eat lunch in a food court across the street. The only thing that looked edible was an egg salad sandwich. It cost $4.50, showing a poor grasp of the concept of an egg salad sandwich, the whole point of which is its inexpensiveness, but I was too hungry not to get anything. So I bought the sandwich and sat down at one of the tables.

An old friend of mine showed up and sat with me.  By this point, I had discovered that the sandwich was not only inappropriately priced, but was disgusting. The egg salad included fresh onions, creating the illusion that the eggs were rotten. It was a struggle to eat, but by the time I made that discovery I was no less hungry and much less wealthy than I had been when I decided to buy the sandwich, so I was stuck with trying to eat the accursed thing.

We started chatting. I told him about the sandwich’s price and disgustingness. He works as member of the university’s staff, in a position where a wide variety of researchers tell him about their work, so he always has something interesting to say. He told me that the price of the sandwich might very well reflect a change in the way foodstuffs are priced, a change that is connected in some way to global warming which is in fact an even worse problem than is generally realized. He began explaining, further, that the idea of mixing fresh onions with egg may be connected to the collapse of production in other crops that are traditional in egg salad, but that was so depressing we quickly changed the subject.

I mentioned the weird slowness of my new computer. He explained that computer hardware makers have now reached the limits of Moore’s Law, while software makers keep adding new functions, so that we can expect computers in general to get slower, not faster, for the foreseeable future. The awkward mouse is apparently the consequence of some other ineluctable trend in the decline of the technological age.

This was getting too grim. I made some remark about what a sunny day it was; that brought him back to global warming, which by the way is acidifying the oceans and triggering a mass extinction event that may yet be the greatest in the earth’s history. I mentioned something about packing my lunch in the future, to avoid inedible food and save money. The reference to saving money reminded him of a researcher who had told him about his findings that people our age (we’re now in our mid-40s) are far more likely than were people in days gone by to spend their retirement years living on the street.

By now I had choked down that entire sandwich. A supremely gloomy conversation was just the thing to take my mind off its loathsomeness. I wanted to close our conversation with something that would not lead him to share depressing information, but couldn’t think of anything. He excused himself, saying he had a meeting in a few minutes. We left it there.