The persistence of the mundane

We ponder some unexciting work.

It is spring, and the call of the road crew is abroad on the land.  With the final exit of winter weather we see many teams doing the necessary maintenance on streets and highways, including the utilities above and below them.  It’s irritating, of course, to have one’s familiar route slowed or blocked, but (unless we’re running very late or the traffic measures seem particularly poor) we realize these things have to happen.  It’s perverse to complain about both a pothole and the work needed to fix it.

[Here in Old Town Alexandria there’s more maintenance affecting pedestrians than elsewhere.  Sidewalks are brick, which is old-world and picturesque, but requires repair more often.  We admit to being annoyed when a combination of street and sidewalk work shifts our walking route several blocks.]

One might think that here, almost a fifth of the way through the twenty-first century, there must be a slick, high-tech way to do everything.  We can order things on-line with a click of the computer key, after sophisticated software has sifted our social medium presence to determine just what it is we want (whether we know it or not).  It quickly appears at our door, and we need not even think about a physical expedition to our grandfather’s department store.  But it appears because someone has brought it there, a person driving on our street (which now and then needs maintenance).  Whatever the software, there’s still that person and that vehicle at the end of it.

Companies are investigating robotic drones to replace them.  No doubt drone deliveries will be common in the near future.  But carrying cargo by drone is energetically expensive.  You might receive a new smartphone that way, but it would be difficult to justify the cost of delivering, say, the rocks for your new front-yard landscaping by drone.  Still, it may be just a matter of another step or two, for driverless cars are certainly coming.

So when should we look for the robot road crew?  Perhaps not soon.  After the driverless cars, certainly, for the different situations and configurations of repairing roads are far more diverse than just driving along them.  And after the autonomous software geologist sent to Mars, for studying dirt is a much easier task than using it to hold the sewer line safely.

Similarly, the warm weather brings with it the need for air-conditioning maintenance.  Perhaps one day a/c units will be so reliable that people will never need to come out and repair them.  Or, perhaps, they will be built with intelligent controllers and ways to repair themselves.  But we suspect that any unit so capable will be too expensive for most people, and air conditioning repairmen will be employed for a long time yet.  Especially in an Alexandria summer.