Absurdity
Navigation App Takes Mental Health Day As Man Stands In Rain Waiting For Bus
By Jeff Garstein, . BSN Network. Satire.
Kevin Bratter, a project coordinator at a mid-size logistics firm that he describes as "technically still operational," left his apartment at 6:58 AM on Tuesday with an umbrella that inverted on contact with the wind, a coffee that was already at 60 percent capacity due to what he called "lid issues," and a phone running Android 14 that he had trusted, until that morning, with his life.
At 7:04 AM, Google Maps displayed a loading screen. At 7:06, it displayed the same loading screen. At 7:09, it sent a push notification reading: "Taking a moment. Back soon. You've got this."
Bratter did not, by any available metric, have this.
The 41 bus had been suspended due to a driver shortage. The 17 was running, technically, in the sense that one had been recorded as departing the depot at 6:45 AM and had not been seen since. The light rail was down for "scheduled unscheduled maintenance," which is a category of maintenance the transit authority introduced in 2023 specifically so the word "scheduled" could appear in more press releases.
A spokesperson for the Columbus Metropolitan Transit Authority confirmed that service disruptions were "part of our ongoing commitment to infrastructure realignment" and that passengers experiencing difficulty should "consult the app." When asked which app, the spokesperson said "the transit app" and then ended the call, which was itself an act of solidarity with the other things that were not working.
The transit app, for its part, had crashed at 7:02 AM and rebooted into a screen offering Bratter the option to rate his last trip. His last trip had been fine. He gave it three stars out of spite and the app thanked him warmly.
Elon Musk, whose company makes the operating system on which none of this was running but who commented on it anyway via X at 7:47 AM, wrote: "If your apps aren't working it's probably the government. Also try restarting." The post received 94,000 likes from people who have also stood in the rain.
Google did not respond to a request for comment, but Maps did briefly load at 7:31 AM to show Bratter a route that required a 22-minute walk through a park the city had closed for drainage issues. The estimated arrival time was 8:14 AM. His meeting was at 8:00 AM. The app added a small green leaf to indicate the route was environmentally friendly, which Bratter later described as "the part that got me."
Dr. Patricia Ellison, a professor of human-computer interaction at Ohio State who was reached by phone and seemed to be eating lunch, said that modern applications are "designed to mirror emotional availability in ways that build user trust," and that a notification suggesting mutual resilience during a service failure was "actually quite sophisticated UX design." She then said she had to go and the call ended.
Bratter eventually got a ride from a coworker named Dennis, who was also late, who also blamed his phone, and who spent the entire drive explaining that he had been about to leave exactly on time when his Waze app suggested a detour through a street that no longer exists. They arrived at 8:26 AM. The meeting had been moved to 9:00 AM via an email sent at 7:55 AM to a Gmail account that had, at that precise moment, been buffering.
The umbrella did not recover.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/09/21/its-raining-the-transport-isnt-working-and-now-an-android-app-wants-to-walk-out-in-solidarity/5297494