At my last job, my commute was about an hour each way, on a typical day. At times I would amuse myself by trying to figure out how much time I could save if I drove at 70, 75, 80, 85 miles per hour. Interestingly (or depressingly) enough, it never amounted to more than ten minutes — and that was assuming that I never slowed down, never got stuck behind someone who was only doing 70. In practice, the only times I ever made those 35 miles in less than 50 minutes was when I was returning home after midnight.
It also meant that if I had a 10 o’clock meeting, I had to be on the road by 9:00 at the very latest. It was very odd, the first time I woke up at 8:45, thought that even in emergency panic mode and with the sort of ruthless optimization that only a life-long geek would concoct, there was no way I could get dressed, cleaned enough to pass for presentable, make a cup of coffee so I wouldn’t crash on the highway, and make it behind the wheel in less than 20 minutes. I realized with a Cold Equations chill that I was already late, even though the meeting wouldn’t begin for more than an hour.
There’s a saying that “what you don’t know won’t hurt you” and it’s obvious nonsense: the cancer eating away at your liver, the distracted driver coming around the blind curve on the road, the mercury in your salmon steak, all can hurt or kill you, whether you know they’re there or not, whether you believe in them or not.
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