How I spent my weekend without a Navigo pass and phone?
Some people will be amazed when they read this title: how did he do? Others, filled with contempt, will think that it’s not so impressive and that you have to be generally uncool to think that owning a phone and a Navigo pass is essential for survival. The majority will still wonder, “How? How could you think that we would care?”
Let me provide some context to begin with. It’s Friday night, and despite being a huge loser who doesn’t participate much in the life of telecom, I went to the passation binouze. “5€, Wtf is that ?” I wondered. To which the Flambed community manager replied, “An abortion is free, and yet you’re here.” So, the actually quite affordable price allowed me to drink a lot of alcohol for an evening, especially the venerable Chouffe beer.
This very affordable price had a solid competition that evening, the inter-association party organized by our cool geek friends from Rezel. They had planned way too much food and drinks for the number of guests. Free beers, and they even had goat cheese tomato cake. How? How could cool people like you, my noble reader, not have been invited to this festivity? It was one of the notable advantages of hanging out with the smelly folks from LudoTech. Yes, I smell and I’m not cool, but I got free cake.
All in all, it was shaping up to be an excellent evening that would be talked about for ages. One could potentially criticize the new bartenders for being somewhat hesitant with the first pints of Chouffe, but I won’t because I love the bar staff who serve me pints even though they’re not getting paid for it, and I don’t pay for my drinks. On the khalass scale, evaluated on a quasi-logarithmic scale, we could, for example, give the bar a six. Which is perfectly respectable if we convert it to the Richter scale; we probably had some deaths by collapsings somewhere. But wait until you see TSM, which reached a peak magnitude of seven, enough to kill several innocent families and leave a lasting mark on the city.
We’ll note the small number of people who came to dance to Rasputin by Boney M. People with little culture, or people busy doing cooler things. But if you find something cooler than dancing to Boney M with five other folks, well, congratulations, you are literally the master of cool to me.
Anyway, as for me, besides going out to steal some cake from Rezel or going to the toilet, or getting another beer, I stayed hidden in my LudoTech where we mainly played board games and did karaoke. Please, don’t judge me, I’m a smelly person.
One evening later, security tells us to leave. I’m not exactly sober either, and I think I left my phone charging on a table. Bingo, I grab it immediately and make a quick exit. Hop, I try to turn on my phone to go to my residence in Bures-sur-Yvette. I have a good fifty minutes to walk in the dark, on roads where if a killer passes by, I’m done for, and no one would know. Ah, great, it’s not my phone. Everyone goes home, no one can help me, I’m a lost man on the plateau, without a phone. [add dramatic music]
Luckily, I come across Pierre*. Most of the time, I wouldn’t have been so happy to see him, but this time I am. He temporarily hosts me. Then, we think about waiting until 6 a.m. to catch my train to Bures. It’s 4:30 a.m… What do we do? We have a little Netflix & Chill session watching Creed. I can’t really tell you if I liked the movie. Apparently, according to my Netflix history, I watched it until 1:23 a.m. As for me, I literally closed my eyes and woke up as if I sinned with Pierre that evening. (That didn’t happen)
Anyway, I rush to catch my train. When I arrive at the station, I realize that I don’t have my Navigo pass. And that’s when I start freaking out. Losing my phone, okay. But losing my Navigo pass is literally the only thing that allows me not to be stuck in my room all the time and travel throughout the Île-de-France region.
I have to go back to my parents’ place, 2 hours of transportation without a phone and by completely bypassing all the steps. Believe me, it was going to be a long journey. Just waiting 20 minutes for the RER stressed me out like crazy.
I realize that stepping out of my phone is a bit like stepping out of a bubble. Honestly, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but when you don’t use your phone in the RER and you see all these people acting like attention-deficient children tapping away on their VTech tablets. I even caught some of them off guard, drooling, then they would look around to see if any other human being had noticed them. It would result in eye contact with me, followed by a shameful breakdown and a return to the profoundly mind-numbing activity they were doing before.
A fish has a memory of three seconds, these people have a memory of three apps. They switch from TikTok to Instagram, from Instagram to Twitter, and from Twitter to TikTok. What deeply bothered me was seeing myself, just a day ago, mindlessly scrolling through my favorite apps in every direction. I award the title of best zombiedroid to the highschooler who was speedrunning activities on his phone. He went through all the stories and messages he had on Instagram in five seconds, liking the posts!
I arrived home, exhausted and a bit ashamed. I still don’t have my phone or even my pass, but well, it can wait.