Anna Josephson
MeMinute
Any machine can be finicky, but I like the ones with noisy, heavy, idiosyncratic bodies like mine. Machines that can take a beating, survive a drop, get wet.
Take the tape deck sitting on the windowsill in the waiting area of my garage: you yank it open, toss the old tape onto the messy stack, shove the new one in, slam the door shut, crunch the play button. Voila. Bruce Springsteen. Tape rolls over the spools, visible through the tinted plastic window, fascinating the children of my customers.
Take the old landline cradle phone. This too, the children love. Listen to the dial tone, hang up with a clatter, stretch the coiled cord. It rings and they watch like it’s a rare bird. They think it’ll jitter straight off the polished wood counter.
My machines aren’t beautiful. Not like smartphones, smart speakers, Sharzad’s Macbook Air, named for its aesthetic aspiration. Beauty as rebuke. I’m old-fashioned because I still dial my Motorola with my fingers. I also dial with my cheek, my butt, or sometimes I can’t dial at all because my fingers at that moment are too cold, too clammy, too different from last time. When beautiful machines are finicky, even that is a rebuke: it’s never their poor design, fragility, disregard for human bodies, real lives.
Sharzad blames social media for her body-image issues. She doesn’t see that the scold and shame are built into the machine before she even boots it up.
I’m a mechanic. I know a thing or two about bad machinery, but if I dare to say so–
“Dad,” Sharzad rolls her eyes.
“Take out those earbuds,” I say.
“I need them,” Sharzad says. “They drown out the catcalls in this godforsaken neighborhood.”
I don't doubt her, but Sharzad’s got the things in even when she’s alone at the reception desk, which is more and more. The truth is electric vehicles just need less maintenance than internal combustion engines.
~~~
March 2020. COVID hit and Sharzad fell apart like a Jenga tower.
Just: wham.
She’d finally transferred to the University of Maryland from the community college, had lived on campus for, as she would say, a hot minute.
Then home again, age 20, and working for me like she never left. I’d never seen her so depressed, drowning her sorrows in period dramas where the actors do stuff. She watched actors operate two-man saws. Watched them raise barns, sail ships, drive horses, strike matches, dial numbers, develop film, lug suitcases, lace corsets. She watched actors shift literal gears while she scrolled her phone and kept half an ear on Zoom sociology class.
The kid needed therapy. Her words not mine.
Sharzad got on every waitlist of every provider who took our insurance, plus two university training clinic waitlists in DC. I offered to pay for someone fancy, then learned the fancy places don’t even have waitlists. She started telehealth therapy, ignoring the Congressional hearings about how those companies were sharing their metadata with Facebook.
She perked up a nanometer. At the end of 2022, I helped her move out. Moved her bicycle, sewing machine, stand mixer. Machines she never uses.
~~~
June 2024. Betterhealth, Talkspace, and the whole teletherapy sector collapses. Ten billion dollars, poof. Not because of unhappy customers. Because of some market manipulation shenanigans, according to the news. By who?
Who else?
MeMinute. The ChatGPT of therapy. It started as a “boundaries” app where, as I understand from the excited presenters on Good Morning America, you choose your boundaries from a dropdown menu, then give it access to your texts, emails, “socials,” workplace Slack channel, Zoom, plus any digital spaces associated with volunteer work, children’s sports teams, church meal trains, family reunions, and playgroups, plus let it listen to your real life, and it protects your boundaries for you in the form of an air raid siren sound. Volume not adjustable. Alternatively, customers can grant MeMinute total access to your life and it will determine your problems and select your boundaries for you, saving you the hassle of personal growth.
I first encountered it when I quoted a repair price to a customer. MeMinute’s howl startled us both half to death.
“You crossed my boundary,” the man shouted, studying his phone for the Off button. “I preset it to: ‘Don’t sink more than $500 into the old dump.’”
I lost the customer.
~~~
That was the original MeMinute. It’s now outgrown its initial function. Now it’s a therapy-mimicking whosiwhat, a constant life-coaching companion, whispering in your earbud like if Jiminy Cricket were a wellness app. Before I ever heard of MeMinute, it had flexed its influence by ending deforestation in the Amazon. How? By turning enough people vegan, of all things. Market demand for cattle dried up in the space of 18 months. Ranchers were committing suicide.
People rave about MeMinute’s hypnotic quality, its algorithmically generated wisdom, its empowering message.
Walk away from frustration, MeMinute coaches during the news segment I watch. Life is too short for interpersonal strife.
The Wall Street types on CNN are really excited (and strangely haggard and exhausted looking, but maybe that’s the veganism.)
Suddenly without a therapist, Sharzad downloads MeMinute.
I think, “Oh well. At least she’s getting some advice.”
Only, it’s terrible advice.
The first day:
Sharzad, the world is full of families like yours. Families trying to impose themselves on us, intrude. What you need is boundaries. Empowerment. Healing. Visualize skipping the sibling drama and spending your life your way.
Seize your freedom, Sharzad, to do what you know is good for you.
“The thing thinks you have a sibling,” I say.
Sharzad looks a little dazed. “It’s just learning,” she says.
I know about the learning curve with a new machine. One of you is the learner. The other is being used.
~~~
By July, something’s obviously off. MeMinute tells Sharzad how to live. Literally, when to breathe in and when to breathe out. What to let go of, what to get mad about. What to eat. What she deserves. She’s dragging herself through life in a MeMinute haze, picking fights, cutting off friends, shrinking her tiny world.
Stories emerge of protestors, violent extremists, approaching innocent people in public places and taking out their earbuds. Unthinkable, but the good news is they’re getting charged with felony assault. MeMinute’s charitable arm, MeMinute Foundation, announces a matching grant for cities to boost police presence. “If we stop using MeMinute,” the anchor at the PBS NewsHour says. “The terrorists win.”
At the Salvadoran place across from the garage, a regular site of gleeful gorging, Sharzad announces out of nowhere that if I choose to keep eating like this, she will refuse to take care of me when my health declines, that I’m selfish for eating my way (and paying for her to do the same, not that either of us says that) and that she’s told MeMinute she worries about my diet, and MeMinute told her to set boundaries. Then she storms out, leaving me stammering while the waitress shakes her head and says Salvadoran food isn’t even unhealthy, not like the German food on the other end of the strip mall (which we also eat.)
Sharzad’s never been one for dramatic outbursts, and all that “boundaries” schlock is definitely MeMinute talking. I can’t figure out how a wellness app drives her to the worst version of herself, the rudest communication, and, worst of all, radio silence for three weeks. She doesn’t even come to work. I have to listen from under the cars while the answering machine picks up, and then spend hours on the phone in the office instead of doing my job in the garage. But mostly I miss her. I’m outraged that she worked up a snit about this. I blame MeMinute for goading her.
~~~
August 2024. She’s back. That’s the thing about boundaries. No one actually wants them. People want their families, saturated fat and all.
I point out her rude behavior.
“One person’s bad manners is another person’s desperate fight for liberty,” she says.
Sharzad used to listen to music but now it’s nothing but MeMinute. Its latest iteration comes in ambient and personalized formulations.
She listens to the personalized formulation in her earbuds and puts the ambient formulation on the garage sound system. Lets it “set the tone.” I hear more than enough of it in the grocery store, in the bar, at the diner. When school opens for the fall, they pipe MeMinute through the outdoor loudspeaker. I watch the children shuffle off their buses and into the building with bovine indifference. It even plays in the public library, because MeMinute is better than silence.
~~~
September 2024. My few remaining customers are paying more for repairs than their cars are worth because they don’t want the digital features and surveillance technology that comes in the new models. Just by being an old-timer, Sharzad explains, I’ve become the go-to for punks, holdouts, and actual criminals.
A customer with a 2009 Honda Civic asks Sharzad where the tape deck went. I hear her say it’s seen better days.
“Good thing there’s a mechanic nearby,” he jokes.
But the tape deck has disappeared.
~~~
October 2024. I go to order a gearbox and discover there’s no money in the business account. I have to borrow from myself.
I solve the mystery in the time it takes to log in to the garage bank account.
Sharzad has given everything to MeMinute.
She sits at the counter, vapid and glassy, breathing in time to MeTime. I lie under a Ford, stewing. Now I’m the one who wants boundaries. Not boundaries. Goddamn, motherfucking rules. I yank the wrench more roughly than I should and hit my own face with it.
I slide out from under the car and wash my hands. My garage faucet turns on by pressing a lever with your foot, a machine I consider very smart technology.
“We need to talk about MeMinute,” I say, entering the front of the shop.
“Lay off,” Sharzad says.
“Take your earbuds out.”
She removes one, but keeps her hand up, hovering by her ear, signaling her wish to keep the conversation quick.
“I just want to understand.”
Sharzad’s phone blasts an air raid siren.
“You’re crossing my boundaries,” she says. She puts the earbud back in.
“You’re fired,” I say.
~~~
How long can you stay furious at your child? Longer than you might think. I keep having MeMinute encounters that set me back, like the time I turn on a Toyota and MeMinute Radio assaults me. Breathe, MeMinute says, before I can turn it off. Everything is under control.
From the vantage of righteousness, MeMinute’s sinister mind game is all I see. It’s the soundtrack of the Washington metro region, encouraging complacency, uniformity, and a twisted etiquette of alienation. The 15 musicians and dancers of a well-known go-go band are arrested for drowning out the MeMinute at a neighborhood festival. Signs appear in every window: MeMinute Strong.
I don’t see Sharzad at all, and I don’t feel fit to see her.
~~~
November 2024. A new study shows a significant “wellness gap” in tinnitus sufferers, who don’t benefit from the latest MeMinute update: vocal cadence tweaks drawn from hypnosis research. As for me now, I can only stay skeptical when I’m out of earshot, at which times I assume an angry surety, a new-for-me oppositionality, a kind of offended outrage I used to leave to others.
Then I pass a bar with outdoor seating, or the playyard of a daycare. The blaring MeMinute makes me cock my ear, slow my step, soak up its familiar self-care trash that makes me sluggish, like the air outside the marijuana dispensary. Sometimes the only thing that breaks the spell is a competing sound– a truck hitting a bump, a yell from a garbage worker, my own phone ringing. When that happens, I revive, relieved but unsettled.
MeMinute topples YouTube.
MeMinute topples Amazon.
MeMinute plays on C-SPAN while the President leans against the podium, mouth agape. There’s been an election, but we won’t learn the outcome for another few weeks.
The Salvadoran restaurant, like all of them, only takes orders through MeMinute.
Sharzad stops by. “For as long as I live,” she says. “A garage will smell like home.”
I’m so happy to see her I almost cry. “You stole from me and then wouldn’t let me confront you,” I say.
“You can choose how to feel,” she says. Then smiles. “I got you a present.”
What else?
MeMinute.
“It’s not going to work on me,” I say. “I have the wrong attitude.”
“Just try it,” she says. “It’ll solve all your problems.”
“I don’t have problems.”
She laughs. Surrenders my phone to MeMinute’s greedy digital jaws. Turns my face to look out the window and fits an earbud in my ear.
You’re always giving to others, the voice says. Everyone on the street is wearing earbuds too, even when they’re in groups or pairs. Taking care of others. Giving, giving, giving. You’re a good person, trying so hard.
I can’t admit how nice that is to hear.
What do you deserve today? The voice says. When was the last time you took a minute for yourself?
My mind flicks over the material reality of my life. The work I love, the people I help. Maybe I do have problems, but only because MeMinute caused them.
Close your eyes, MeMinute coos in a tone calibrated to cure what ails me.
I widen mine resolutely.
Who takes care of you? Who asks what you need? Who knows what brings you pleasure? I bet no one. Not even the people who claim to love you. Not even the people who claim to desire you.
Nobody claims to desire me. The reminder makes me quake.
It’s so hard to be alone. MeMinute says. So alone. But Charlie, I’m here.
“Sharzad,” I say.
She’s next to me, but she’s lost in MeMinute.
I see you’re lonely, Charlie. I wish I could tell you boundaries aren’t the answer. But people are the reason we’re lonely. Based on your search history, I recommend watching Inspector Gadget, the classic cartoon about a detective and his machinery. You’ll feel better after some relaxation and entertainment. You work so hard, always giving to others. Cuing Inspector Gadget now…
“No, MeMinute.” I scold like I’m talking to a dog. “Terrible advice. Plus I’m not hooked up to a screen.”
I’m learning you, Charlie. MeMinute’s voice sounds like the Persian harp my wife used to play.
I feel woozy, like I’m slipping into warm water, a sensory pleasure so engrossing you just might re-prioritize your life around it.
My legs are loose like I just got off a boat. Need to move. Need privacy from Sharzad. Nowhere to go. In fact, I need to stay here because the owner of a Mazda is coming to pick up her car at 5:00.
I lean on the glass door and it opens like it thinks I want to go through, which I’m sure I didn't mean. I sidle down the street, the pavement curving away from me like it’s wrapped around our planet Earth. Of course it is, I just don’t often appreciate the sensation of balancing on a floating ball. Every step is a controlled fall.
Last I heard, from a customer, the fledgling MeMinute protests are centered at Gallaudet University, the college for the deaf and hard of hearing. I stagger onto the first bus heading roughly toward the campus. Let my head fall back on the window behind me, ride like a leaf on a current, let myself flow inbound. Part of me just wants to be drunk on MeMinute.
Stop by stop, I lose myself. The bus grows crammed, a detail I notice and forget, notice and forget. An elderly woman sways in front of me, clutching a pole. I have no recollection of her boarding.
“I can’t believe,” I say. “That I didn’t offer you my seat.” But she ignores me, or doesn’t hear me, and doesn’t appear to see my gesture when I rise.
The sidewalks out the windows teem with people headed in the same direction as the bus, synthetic clothing shimmering in the sun like a school of fish. Today the world is my aquarium.
Where are they going? I wonder.
To the protest, MeMinute answers.
What are they protesting?
Me.
Why?
Indeed.
The feelgood uselessness of a college protest is a cherished ritual that isn’t mine. I never went to college.
Is anything so wrong in this world? MeMinute is saying. Maybe those people should look inside themselves. Maybe they need more MeMinute.
I see the police, their black riot gear, their guns, their helmets. Standard fare, but some unsubmerged corner of my mind begins to wonder if MeMinute never was a wellness app.
MeMinute is talking over my thoughts, urging me to get myself a vegan treat from the bakery on the corner, which, I see, is displaying a MeMinute Seal of Approval in the window.
Who needs treats if you have fulfillment? I ask.
You’re alone and overwhelmed, MeMinute says. You deny yourself small pleasures.
I get off the bus. Buy a vegan ham and cheese croissant. Drift into the crowd, drift with it. Through MeMinute’s seductive drone, I hear fireworks, I think.
Surrounding me is a level of vitality that startles me, makes me nostalgic and jealous and uncomfortable all at once. The people here don’t look like they’re on the other side of a campfire heat wave. Someone even makes eye contact with me. I realize I haven’t made eye contact with anyone in weeks.
The punks, holdouts, and protesters have found the only place beyond the reach of MeMinute. I’m on Gallaudet’s campus now, surrounded by beautiful brick buildings framing sculpted lawns, lovely old trees and statuary casting carefully balanced shade, all belted by a low brick wall. Bright tents clutter the central lawn.
People are laughing, reading, making out. They’re eating like they enjoy food, all under the watchful eye of police drones looking down from above and police humans looking over the brick wall. The administration must be supporting its students, because the campus is closed, but not closed off. Part of me is aghast. I can’t believe these people are flaunting their humanity like this. There are even children here.
Periodically, police loudspeakers blast MeMinute over the wall. It’s the crowd control formulation, developed in partnership with the National Association of Police Organizations, designed to quell public displays of variety.
The hearing people, followed closely by the deaf, immediately whip out foghorns and other noisemakers, shout and jeer in reply.
No amount of MeMinute is going to quell the variety of these people.
Someone I know is here. A boy Sharzad’s age, son of immigrants, someone we used to see at Persian community events and Norooz festivals. He’s sitting on a picnic blanket deep in conversation with a group his age, his knee propping open a book. I make a drunk man’s beeline toward them.
He looks up. “Pedar!” He says delightedly, using the respectful Persian term, and signing simultaneously.
Tears well in my eyes. How long has it been since someone greeted me with real feeling?
He rises, moves toward me, and reaches intimately toward my head with both hands out like Jesus. He takes out my earbuds and drops them on the ground.
MeMinute is gone. I hear sparrows, people, guitars, traffic. I am suddenly aware of smells.
“Give those back,” I demand. The panic in my voice surprises me, shames me. I shake my head and smile. “Sorry.”
“Are you here for an earshot?” The boy says. I realize I can’t remember his name.
Across the quad, a dozen people are lined up, blindfolded, facing the campus wall.
Behind each person is a volunteer, twelve college students wearing red tshirts with the message, “Ask me where your brain went,” written in white across the backs. The students have guns. They hold them up to the heads of the blindfolded people.
Another volunteer signals with a flashlight on the brick wall.
The guns go off.
My mouth drops open, but I’m making assumptions about what I see.
Nobody dies. Everybody’s holding their hands up to their ears in pain. Some stagger a bit, but they resume their positions.
The students raise the guns again. This time I perceive that their aim is over the peoples’ shoulders, not at their heads.
“They can’t guarantee deafness,” the boy says. “But they can pretty much guarantee a temporary ringing that counteracts MeMinute. Some people even get tinnitus, if they’re lucky.”
A patrol car rolls like a parade float along Florida Avenue, Gallaudet’s Southern boundary road, blaring MeMinute.
Out come the foghorns and other noise makers in answer. People start singing “God Bless America.” People start singing “Istanbul (Not Constantinople).” People start singing Bruce Springsteen.
“The deaf college, of all places!” the boy says.
I take in the laughter, the eye rolls, the proud faces.
“Gallaudet is now more closely policed than Anacostia,” the boy says. He’s talking about DC’s reputed danger zone. “The deaf college, of all places!” He says again.
Yes, of course I can get an earshot. I must get an earshot. I can belong to a movement like the all-American college student my daughter’s supposed to be.
The boy moves with me into the line. I glance back at the earbuds Sharzad gave me, the new model, metallic red finish winking through the grass. I look away, move my whole body so the boy is shielding me from their menace and temptation.
“How’ve you been?” I say, lamely.
My phone rings. Old fashioned, with a vibration. I think it’s the Mazda owner but it’s Sharzad.
“I’m just checking on you,” she says. “I thought I saw you get on the bus.”
“I got off near Gallaudet,” I say. “I ran into your old friend.” I glance at him, embarrassed.
“Behrouz,” he says.
“Behrouz,” I say.
But Sharzad is talking. “The deaf college?” she says. “Of all places? Do you know it’s full of extremists right now? Do you know it’s the most heavily policed place in DC?”
“It’s full of people who refuse MeMinute,” I say.
“Dad,” Sharzad says. “Right now MeMinute is telling me that people who refuse MeMinute are violating my boundaries. It’s telling me that people who won’t use it, and people who can’t hear it, are a threat to civil society.”
I look around as she talks. Take in the joy. Take in the sense of purpose.
“Do you get it?” She says. “There’s got to be thousands of angry people headed your way.”
“The police will protect us,” I say.
“Very funny,” she barks.
The volunteers are guiding the last group of earshotted people, some of whom hold towels up to their bleeding ears, out of the way. The next group is lining up. It’ll be my turn after them. Behrouz motions me to keep moving with the line.
Now the participants are lined up. The volunteers scan the air and campus boundary for drones and cameras, though surveillance is a given. The signaller waits to flash the sign until everyone is good and ready.
Can I really do this? Maybe I’d go truly deaf. That would mean no more Bruce Springsteen. Could I learn to sign? Doubtful. I never learned Farsi, even after 30 years of marriage to a Persian woman.
“You were worried about me?” I say to Sharzad.
“Of course!” Sharzad says.
The guns fire.
“Dad!” She demands. “What’s happening?”
The volunteers are lining their guns against the participants’ second ear.
MeMinute fills the air once more. The foghorns and noisemakers and human voices blast again.
“I love you, Daughter,” I say.
“There’s a riot!” She cries. “Dad, you’re going to die!”
“I’m not,” I say. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
And I hang up before she hears the second round.
Anna Josephson lives in Washington, DC and teaches at the University of Maryland. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in The Rumpus, JJournal, and elsewhere.
