The Ten and a Half-Minute Window
Progress is pulled by the other cars in traffic. The other cars are your traction. You gauge the rate of your advance by how many you manage to get in front of. Even a heavy buildup is not so bad if you happen to be the one that gets the right lanes, because no matter how slowly the world is moving, it is always better to be faster than everyone else around you.
Without the interplay of other cars, and the hills and turns alongside them, you fail to sense the speed. It is like having the windows up and how it severs your connection to the outside elements. When you have the windows down, the wind in your face and the noise throw you roaring down the road. The sonic vibration make the speed a reality. That may be why today, when all can be made to be quiet, noisy cars are still in demand.
A career is the same thing. Without the interactions of others, you won’t have access to a “feeling” of how you’re doing. You need friends and acquaintances to situate yourself in your place in the world. And if you happen to be noisy in just the right speeds, you are the one who is garnering traction for success.
The conditions of a satisfactory commute need to be just right. And I’m not talking about a real traffic pile-up, where all has hopelessly halted, where there is no other recourse but to imagine yourself far away, listening to something on your speakers for purely escapist intentions. For the traffic I have in mind, there needs to be flow. There is a special time in the morning; it is neither too close to here or to there — it rides the line on a ten and a half-minute window. If you leave your house within this window, you will enter a roadway of marvelous pits and turns. In this special time of the weekday morning where there are streams of cars, but not enough to grind you to a halt, you weave through lanes like a stage magician goes through tricks.
During that time, the commute is a playground, when the spaces between the vehicles are just so, allowing you to speed up to pass a slow-moving van just before getting in front of a rig. I’m slipping past a long line of cars as I think of this. I’m watching out for the one car actually going faster than me that will tear in front of me — a potential accident. All five senses are pivoting on such a possibility. The exit is coming. I stay on the left-most lane until the last mile. I know the feel of the approach. An opening shows up on the right lane, and I take it. In ten more seconds, I move into the right again. I can see the exit now. I need to get over two more lanes. I do this without cutting into people because no good comes out of pissing people off, and I’m on the home stretch, but there’s a truck in front of the five cars before mine, and I decide to gun it. I cross into the next lane, loop back over and get in front of the steady mass of truck and followers, getting off the ramp and looping toward a yield sign on the local road, starting the last leg of my trip on the local streets. The following five — no, seven green lights you breeze through are the bonus points. You can shave two minutes from your drive to work. You can cut off five whole minutes if you get a good rhythm. Today, I’m pounding off almost ten.
You are diverting your attention with the extras of weaving through traffic to score more points. You’re starting your day with movement, and you hope that you can take that momentum and use it at work. It sure beats the other option, when it has always been a monotonous chore of pressing the brake after touching the gas and then pressing the brake. There is nothing to be said about a gridlock because nobody wants to recall this special corner of frustration, and if work happens to be the same, the day may be more misery and less interactive fun. The people stuck in such a day play music and move their heads to some other frequency to leave behind the obligation of harmonizing with the rest of the droll world.
But out of nowhere, an unexpected vehicle cuts in front of me, forcing my brakes to prevent an accident. A pickup truck with all the gardening tools swinging off the frame of pipes over the flatbed. No really! Does this guy need to get to the next client’s yard so bad? To risk an accident? He’s a gardener; it’s not like he’s got a clock to punch in. And before I get to the destination, there’s two other guys snapping in front of you without a care to the curses aimed at them and their forebears. They’ve got to get to the red light before you. On some level, I can understand this logic. Because you never know if the guy you didn’t cut in front of happens to be the slowest in the pack. But these people don’t care about honking horns and flashing high beams. They got in front of you, and that’s all that matters.
That is one of the possibilities a tight, dynamic traffic load brings. It is a feature you’ve got to contend with. A dynamic road could bring such unexpected causality.
The only other possibility on the road is when it is open. Even here in Los Angeles County, there are times when the roads are free of any congestion, and driving on that road does not invoke ten decisions every minute because you’re going at the speed you find comfortable, and you know when you need to exit several miles ahead of the game. If weaving through traffic is fun and being stuck behind a wall of idle cars is soul-draining, then the open road is the way it should be, you argue. Why shouldn’t it be this way? You are thinking about it, and why couldn’t everything be this way?
But the open road is a myth that only happens on the roadways during freakish times. The truth is that we humans enjoy the traction caused by obstacles on the road as we try to negotiate them to leave them in our dust. If those obstacles are other people, well then so much the better. It improves our game to actually be matched against the minds of others.
You feel it’s the same thing when applying for that job. You never got the interview. But then you find out about the acquaintance that had the exact same credentials as you, and you discover that this person not only made the first and second interview, but this person got the job! And you wonder how you never got the initial interview in the first place. And you put the pieces together, trying to account for this colossal misstep in the machinery, and coming up with some foul-tasting conclusions.
If you get passed up for a job, it is because somebody else got it. And when you get that job you wanted, it is you holding your vehicle steady all the way on the left before making the approach on the suitable exit and cutting to the right to pass everyone who was patiently lining up to get a chance at it. Many people can’t win at that game. That game is won by the ones with the better cars and the better windows of opportunity right from the start. It is an uneven game, and the ones that are in the back have little chance of ever making it out of the freeway.
But one big difference between the progress of cars and careers in this attenuated analogy is that everyday, you start over in traffic. Your game does not resume from yesterday. You could win today even if you never had a chance of winning the big time in life. If you start your morning by beating almost everybody else in the traffic game, it might just start off your day on the right note. And that’s at least one good day.
— Rey Armenteros