Deep space

I bet more than a few of us took granted for how easy it once was to invade someone’s personal space. We barely gave it much thought, but we did it anyway. Boy were we naïve. Say a colleague goes out for an important working lunch with the goal of stumbling back into the office questionably conscious two to three hours later. Like a prisoner incarcerated for a crime he probably didn’t commit (not that it’s really relevant here) caught gazing at a man-size hole in the side of the prison wall – this was your opening. So you didn’t waste it. 

Perhaps you dissemble their chair piece-by-piece and in a bit of wry commentary, replace it with a post-it note that in bold sharpie lettering reads, “chair.” Maybe you douse the entire area in water but from a bottle that says “kerosene” and leave matches strewn about. That’s not you though. It’s too overstated, too dramatic. You’re the type who waits under their desk with an industrial strength airhorn planning to ring them back into sobriety. Whispering “I know you pilfered the supply closet last Tuesday” before returning to an unapologetic sense of normalcy.

Invading personal space affects everyone from normally good-humored relatives and standoffish neighbors to trapped pets and strangers cursed with sharing your commute. Shrill calls for social distancing shouldn’t have to end this timeless global pastime. There are other ways, easier ways. Could we all give up, content on being separated by time and space? Potentially. But that’s not the American way. We all have to adapt and come together while still very much apart. Irritating someone else cannot die out simply because we’re not in the same room. Look at the great strides made by cyber bullies in recent years. They were staring down the barrel of irrelevance and instead of giving up and succumbing to bouts of self-pity, they changed with the times. Good for them. Now they are much stronger because of it. You don’t have to literally steal someone’s lunch money anymore to send them spiraling towards a life of confusion and low self-esteem.

The moral of the story is not to give up on technology because it’s different. But to use it as a tool. In the old days, you could probably make a few dozen laps around the office with the sole purpose of engaging a rival in mindless banter, distracting them from their job and hopefully ruining any chances of a quarterly raise. These subtle acts of kamikaze small talk take their toll on even the most cold-blooded employee. 

The siren song of a vibrating phone should sound off every eight to fourteen seconds. Stretch out your texts, sending a single letter per minute. Ping them. Ring them. Ding them. Before you could only bother someone in your presence. Invading personal space had to take place in person. Today, ruining someone’s dinner with a barrage of idiotic messages and persistent requests to video chat is very much on the table. 

It takes very little intelligence or time to open up a texting thread, email chain and slack channel, bombarding someone with infinite levels of inanity not seen since the heyday of Two and a Half Men. A weekly televised drama about the intersection of two old friends and their tragic roommate, a time-traveling centaur named Johnson, who's caught in a love triangle between the demigods Kleos and Hubris. The series ended in fabulous fashion with Johnson, newly single and for once happy, entering the Belmont Stakes in the dual role as  jockey and horse. The finale is left wonderfully ambiguous as to whether or not he broke Secretariat's track record. 

What's not ambiguous is how simple it is to bug someone virtually. All you need is a smartphone and no shame.