Commentary: More conveniences just might kill us

As I write this, I am on an airplane.

Several experiences from my day of travel, from waking up in the still-dark and driving to the airport and then winging it across the country — every movement fraught with haste — have led me to offer here a modest proposal for creating a more equitable universe.

You’ve heard of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”? Well, my manifesto is called “The Truth of Inconvenience.”

The first tenet is that all airline and airplane manufacturing executives should be required to spend their workday, all day, every day, in the seat of a contemporary commercial aircraft, sitting in those seats and doing their work on a fold-out tray.

I believe we would see rapid change in airline comfort standards. I cannot fathom what it would be like to be a large person and fly on a plane. I am small and it is a living, breathing hell.

I think that all airport executives — and any other people involved in the procurement of automated-flush toilets and sinks in public restrooms — should be required to have these fixtures installed in their own homes, including their showers, so they have to wave at some mysterious red electronic eye that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, blindly with soap in their eyes, to restart the flow of water which capriciously keeps stopping and driving them insane.

I want to flush my toilet when I want to flush it. And as many times as I want to flush it. Not when a microchip thinks it is time.

I pay taxes. Is this too much to ask?

The people who are responsible for public restrooms should also have all the towels removed from their bathrooms at home so they can dry their hands, their feet and their everything else by standing in a high-pitched 30-second blast of moderately warm air.

I’m just thinking out loud here.

I think that every time a gas station owner puts gas in his or her own car, the pump should run at the rate of speed — for the whole time — that it does for the last 30 cents when I pay cash for my gas.

I think automobile engineers ought to have delayed dimmer switches installed in their homes so that every time they turn off a light, it will not actually go off, but stay on for a while, an indeterminate amount of time — really, it’s anybody’s guess — and then maybe or maybe not go off by itself in a little while.

I would like to decide when I turn my lights on and when I turn my lights off. If I’m stupid enough to leave my headlights on, then I’m willing to accept the consequences.

These are decisions I want to make in my life. Is it too much to ask?

I think the executives of any car company that still sells automobiles that automatically snap and buckle you into the seat right as you sit in it should be strapped into their couch every time they sit down to watch TV.

On this topic, I think that TV station managers should have to watch their own TVs permanently set at the volume that they broadcast commercials.

I think that when executives from airline, credit card and utility companies are trying to conduct business by phone, they should first have to relay exactly all the information and business they wish to discuss by punching numbers into an automated computer system based in Indonesia which will then decide with whom — and even if — they may be granted the rare privilege of talking to a human being.

How come nobody at the phone company ever actually answers the phone?

I think you should Press 1 for Spanish and press nothing for English.

I realize this is all tilting at windmills. The war is over and Boeing won. I had a bad day flying, but here’s the weird thing: Nothing went awry on my trip, it all went normally and, well … I discovered I don’t like normal. Not the new normal.

I’m getting tired of “convenience.” If the people who provided “convenience” services — airlines, autos, phone companies — actually had to use those services, I think things would be a little different. I think things would be a little better.

What if businesses had to use their own businesses? Imagine this: What if everyone who works at Allstate were required to insure their homes with State Farm and everyone at State Farm had to insure theirs with Allstate? Think there’d be any changes in the way they settle claims?

Probably not, but I bet it would scare the bejesus out of all of them.

This is just a beginning, a humble plea for sanity and a plaintive howl against the crazed intoxication of systems that allegedly make my life more convenient.

Maybe one day we consumers can actually expect convenience from all this convenience?

Crazy, I know. But as a wise man once said: If you don’t have dreams, you have nightmares.

He must have been a frequent flier.