There was a time, not that long ago, when giving an ETA involved a sort of gentleman’s shrug. “About three,” you’d say, which could mean anything from ten to three to half past, depending on traffic, weather, and whether you’d remembered where you put your keys. It wasn’t imprecise so much as civilised. It allowed for life to intervene without anyone reaching for a stopwatch.
Now, of course, we have satellites. We have Waze. We have a calm, faintly judgemental voice informing us that we will arrive at precisely 15:23, and not a second sooner. And the unsettling thing is, for any journey of decent length, it’s usually right. Not vaguely right, but properly right. Three and a half hours across the country, and you glide onto the drive at exactly the minute predicted, as if the entire road network has been choreographed in your honour.
This has quietly changed the social contract. “I’ll be there at 15:23” is no longer a hopeful estimate, it’s a commitment bordering on a blood oath. Arriving at 15:25 is no longer “on time”, it is a failure of execution. One can almost imagine the other party glancing at their watch, noting the discrepancy, and marking it down somewhere. A small black mark against your name for temporal sloppiness.
What’s happened, really, is that we’ve taken a tool designed to manage traffic and turned it into a device for measuring human reliability. Waze is not just telling you when you’ll arrive, it’s setting a standard you are now expected to meet. And because it factors in traffic, roadworks, and the sort of obscure rat-runs that would once have required a local farmer and a hand-drawn map, it removes all the old excuses. You can no longer blame congestion, or a diversion, or getting stuck behind something agricultural. The algorithm knew about that. The algorithm allowed for it. The algorithm is quietly disappointed in you.
Except, of course, for one small and entirely human flaw in the system. You do, in fact, arrive at exactly 15:23. The little arrow glides to its destination, the voice falls silent, and for a brief moment you feel like a man in full command of his destiny. And then reality intrudes.
You have to park. You have to turn the engine off. You have to locate your phone, your keys, your glasses, the thing you definitely had on the passenger seat five minutes ago. You have to extract yourself from the car with whatever dignity remains, gather your bags, close the door, possibly reopen it because you’ve forgotten something, and then make your way to the front door like a normal human being rather than a data point.
By the time you actually ring the bell, it is 15:25.
So despite hitting the ETA with surgical precision, you are, in practical terms, late. Not late in the old, forgiving sense of “somewhere around three”, but late against a standard you never consciously agreed to but now feel faintly guilty about. Two minutes. Two entirely predictable, unavoidable, human minutes.
We’ve ended up in a curious place. The technology is extraordinarily good. It can predict, with eerie accuracy, the movement of your car across half the country. What it cannot account for is the final twenty yards, where you revert from a moving dot on a screen to a slightly disorganised person with a bag and a front door to negotiate.
And somehow, that’s the bit that still defeats us.
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