Welcome To the Byzantine Empire

My wife and are are currently dabbling in the Byzantine Empire. We understand that everyone else has been living in it for some time, but bear with us. Perhaps our experiences will ring some distant bell in your memory of the beforetimes, when people dealt with people, and liked it. I’ll explain.

We sold our house. We are out on the loose, darkening unfamiliar doorsteps and towels. We’re renting things. We’re paying for things we normally don’t encounter, like bad meals, which seem to be the only kind available at any price in any restaurant we can find. We’ve discovered that nothing is straightforward anymore. Everything we remember is the same thing with extra steps. Exasperating, hinky, cellphone steps.

To rent a house, we dealt with an online service that sent us to a pair of invisible overlords who first decided in some opaque fashion if they wanted our money. They eventually relented and said it had the correct, more obscure presidents on it. Then they dutifully emailed us the wrong combination to the front door. Well, not right away. The first time they sent us a link that opened their online insurance policy instead of the front door. When we inquired whether they were expecting more trouble from us than we were planning on delivering, they apologized, in please don’t knock off a star language, and then sent us the wrong keycode.

So 20 hours after starting our day at 1AM, and moving the last of all our possessions, we were standing in the sleet in front of a strange, dark door that told me over and over with angry beeps that I hadn’t said the magic word, and we couldn’t come in. We texted the mystery overlords and waited, too tired to be angry, really. They eventually got back to us, and pleaded that they had caught some form of dyslexia from a public toilet seat or something, and gave us what they hoped was the correct, descrambled version of the code. Or, they said, we could knock on the downstairs door. The actual owner of the house lives there, and could let us in. They lived in another state and had never been there. Byzantium.

A day later, we wanted to meet some relatives at a central gathering spot a few towns over from where we’re staying. It was a prominent watering hole that’s part of a converted mill building in a suddenly hip Maine suburb. We were instructed to forget about parking on the street, because the area would be jammed, and pay for parking in a garage across the street. I knew, without knowing, that this would be impossible, but I played along for comity’s sake. We pulled up to the garage with pockets full of money. There was no way to give money to a person or a machine to park there. Not even a credit or debit card. You were supposed to scan a QR code and pay using one of two execrable apps we don’t have on our phones. I know the moderne person thinks this makes things yet more moderne, but it really just makes a simple process into a Byzantine exercise.

I know you’re just supposed to immediately surrender whatever vestigal autonomy you might have left, and immediately give St. Jobs Pocket Pandora whatever it asks for, but I refused. We banged a youie and parked ten blocks away and hoofed it through a below-freezing early winter howler. Our companions wondered why we were later than expected, and filed our experience under “Our retard relatives are Amish,” like they usually do. They file their completely passive surrender to whatever their phone demands of them as being cutting edge tech savvy. I run a little web hosting business that spans two continents, and manipulate Google like it’s a toddler, but I’m an tech idiot, I gather.

But the real reason I didn’t sit in the parking garage with my teeth chattering and my fingers trembling on the phone’s keypad to download their junk apps was because I knew in my heart that no matter how much autonomy I was willing to surrender, the app wouldn’t end up working anyway. I’d be bombarded with spam forevermore, but I wouldn’t be able to park in that garage. That’s because Byzantium is never a one-step process. If you think your problems are going to be solved by just chaining yourself to their oar, you’re bound to be disappointed when the guy yells ramming speed and you’re whipped until you start rowing fast enough to suit the captain.

In our new, Byzantine world, he’s probably in another state, and has dyslexia, too. And you don’t know just how fast marring speed is.