iPods Are the New Rubik’s Cubes

The concept of “killing time” is — or at least should be — anathema in such a city, but sometimes its residents have no choice. After several apparently related/apparently unrelated (depending on who is speaking) recent subway mishaps (or if you’re writing headlines for a tabloid, “snafus,” as in “subway snafus”), even the subway-riding Mayor is venting about the subway’s troubles.

Lest the obvious answer seem too obvious — Read the newspaper! Read the Times, even! — the Times gets into the heads of New Yorkers to discover how they kill their time:

A barometer of just how bad the recent subway delays have been can be found in Sacha Newley’s reading habits. Mr. Newley, a painter from the Upper West Side, has certain books that he reserves only for subway reading. Two months ago, around the time the delays began, he picked up his latest: “Moby-Dick.” He’s now on Chapter 107.

A great book, Mr. Newley said, but a paltry coping technique when faced with the angst of a serious delay, when a quick hop underground turns into an interminable wait on an ever-crowding platform with no more information than an occasional belch from the loudspeaker. He and hundreds of thousands of other passengers have found themselves in that very situation over the past two months, forced by an epidemic of power failures and track fires to count the tiles, reread Us Weekly, stare forlornly into the abyss or debate whether to give it up and take a cab.

There are two things wrong with this next passage:

. . . [W]hen one is still standing on a platform and already 10 minutes late to work, it does not really matter whether the recent delays are just a run of bad luck or the first rumblings of total breakdown. The iPod might work well as a distraction, just as the Rubik’s cube did 20 years ago. But more than anything, waiting is a mind game.

“I’m planning my wedding,” said Whitney Burrell, 30, a medical student who lives on the Upper East Side. “I think about everything that could go wrong. Every permutation that could go wrong. The photographer doesn’t show up. The hairstylist doesn’t show up.”

When she snaps out of it, Ms. Burrell said, it isn’t so bad to be standing on a subway platform. Anyway, it’s a way to pass the time.

The first is obvious: the vision of commuters working on Rubik’s cubes while waiting out a track fire is just not plausible — though if I were working on a 1980s period piece, I might be tempted to put the image into the script. (Side note: is Times writer Campbell Robertson really equating the satisfaction one gets from an iPod to the passing distraction of a Rubik’s cube? Has he never used an iPod? Does he forget what a waste of time Rubik’s cubes were? Perhaps he’s a Rubik’s cube champion — though a cursory Google check suggests not.)

The second thing wrong with the paragraph is that even being trapped on a train for hours — in the dark — could be preferable to planning a wedding. Poor comparison. Please go back to the field to collect another quote!

But maybe the reason you rarely hear folks in New York talk about “killing time” is because they have a euphemisms for it — “existential aspects,” being “zenlike,” “zoning out”:

The feeling of helplessness, which prompted one young man on the F train to muse on the subway’s “existential aspect,” is a recurring theme brought up by frustrated commuters.

“It’s the subway system,” said Connie Robinson, 27, a house manager at Studio 54. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”

Though Ms. Robinson, who lives in the Bronx, said she had been seriously delayed at least once a week in the past few months, she said a Zenlike approach was the only way to cope.

“If you don’t have a book you don’t have a choice but to zone out,” she said.

And the Times becomes the new Rubik’s cube, we discover that, as perverse as it seems, even New Yorkers kill time.