Maria's Morning — Summary

Maria’s phone alarm goes off at 6:30. It is a weekday, which means the notebook, the purse, the bus, the series of systems that organize her day into obligations separated by transit. A benefits notice arrived yesterday. She does not understand it. She has been receiving notices since Daniel was born, and the notices have become more automated and less legible over time.

The notice says her benefits have been adjusted. The notice does not say whether she needs to do anything. There is an app, HealthBridge, that costs $12.99 a month and would clarify the notice in seconds. Maria does not have the app. The $12.99 is dinner for two nights. The divide between Margaret’s relationship to these systems and Maria’s is not measured in dollars but in the assumption embedded in every interface: that the user already has what Maria does not.

Maria takes the bus. The bus comes at 7:15 or it comes later. She arrives at the social services office at 9:45. The lobby has been redesigned. The intake is digital. The caseworker is kind and competent. The issue takes five minutes to resolve: the notice was generated by an automated process that works correctly from inside the system’s logic. The error was in the assumption that Maria could determine, without assistance, that the notice was an error.

The trip took two and a half hours, including the bus, the wait, and the five-minute conversation. Two and a half hours for a system error that generated a notice that generated an anxiety that generated a bus trip that consumed a morning. The frictionlessness built for one population is friction for another, and the populations who experience the digital alternative as harder may simply be outside the design frame.

Maria takes the bus home. She eats standing up. She has a shift at 2:00, at the same grocery store where Margaret shops, the same self-checkout where Margaret had trouble with the scale. The notebook is in her purse. The bus comes at 1:15. The bus comes when it comes.