Tuesday 17 April 2018

Day 14: Business Travel

Although I am lucky enough to be able to spend quite a bit of time working from home I occasionally have to get out of Paris to see clients. Thus today:
  • Taxify (Uber competitor without the nasty culture) to the Station
  • TGV to Rennes
  • Taxi to the client site
  • Taxi back to the station
  • TGV back to Paris
  • Electric scooter from the station to home (to pick up my glasses which I had forgotten)
  • Taxify to Roissy Airport
  • Find out my 9PM flight to Munich has been cancelled (my contribution to the fight for better pay of Air France flight attendants)
  • Book a new flight to Nuremberg for the next morning (hopefully this one will leave)
  • Taxi back home
  • Book Taxi for next morning 6:30AM 
On my trip back my Taxi driver was a friendly Moroccan woman.  My general attitude to taxis has been that the sooner they are replaced by self driving cars the better.  But I have to say that when you come across warm, friendly drivers it makes you think that maybe by eliminating all these simple day to day human interactions we might be losing something.  It's easy to imagine that in the world of tomorrow (not that far away) our human contact will be limited to our family, friends and colleagues.  No more taxi drivers, waiters, shop assistants, doctors (absolutely), flight attendants (hurrah), bus drivers, train conductors (double hurrah), museum guides, garage attendants, etc..  at least the delivery agents will probably be still there.

Be that as it may I'm sure that we may not lose more then we realise if we give in to the relentless logic of the economic argument that machines are cheaper and more efficient than people.

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