From the Editor’s Desk: More Time (Premium)

I’m lying on our bed in the apartment in Roma Norte as I write this, surrounded by all manner of electronics, each waiting to be sorted to stored accordingly. We’re flying home in the morning, and the last day of each trip has turned into a sort of ritual in which the two of us take stock of what we have here, what we’ll leave and what we’ll take home, and what we think we might need to bring on the next trip.

I wish I had more time.

I mean, I always do. I expressed one form of this all-too-familiar feeling, a form of regret, I guess, back in April in From the Editor’s Desk: Puente (Premium). But there’s more urgency before and at the end of trips like this: If I forget something and go home without it, three months will pass before I can set it straight. Unless I want to put out one of our neighbors, that is. (Which we’ve done: Some friends in the building have a set of keys to our place just in case.)

This thought came to mind recently when I saw a headline for a recommended article in Pocket with the awkward title People’s Last Words Are Often These 4 Phrases: What They Teach Us About Living Happy, Meaningful Lives, From an Oncologist. This isn’t the type of thing I usually read, but I was positive one of the phrases would be, “I wish I had more time.” And so I looked.

I was wrong. Instead, each was some version of a person expressing love for those around them after a lifetime of not saying it enough. Which is sad to me and, fortunately, not an issue. The people around me know I love them. I at least have that much.

What I don’t have is enough time.

Before this trip, I made a to-do list of everything I wanted to get done while we were here. My wife listed everything she wanted to get done. And the two of us made plans for various things we’d accomplish together. She’s more organized than I am, and there’s little doubt she got more done, percentage-wise, than I did. I did OK, but I always seem to run into weird blockers—like the Phone Link issues I wrote about in Windows 11 Field Guide Update: Thankless—that stop me in my tracks like a curse. Or the bizarre week-long delay in me getting a Copilot+ PC to review that required me to scramble this past week to catch up. Which I think I handled it about as well as I could, especially given how upsetting that was.

But I wanted to get more done. I wanted to make more progress on the book, wanted to … you know, it doesn’t really matter. I just wake up and work, and I run out of time. Not every day. But many days.

I want things to just work. This is a big part of the reason I have so much invested—and not just mentally, as it turns out—in Windows 11 on Arm, Snapdragon X, and what Microsoft has stupidly decided to market as Copilot+ PC. I have what are clearly unrealistic expectations. For example, I feel strongly that a laptop should actually power on, and instantly, when I open its lid. And that when I plug that laptop into a USB-C hub, one it’s used many times before, that it, too, will work, that the second display will fire up, and the webcam will work. But these things rarely all work, and I waste time trying to figure out why. Time I could be using for something more rewarding.

This wouldn’t matter, I suppose, if I just had more time. I often sleep poorly, in rare cases getting up in the middle of the night, which is not ideal, but more often just getting up earlier. So I guess I do get more time in those cases, though there’s always a price to pay, and then we’re back at the beginning, or worse, when I finally catch up on my sleep.

I am always reminded of time failing me.

There’s the United pop-up telling me it’s time to choose a meal three or four days before the flight, an unhappy reminder that the trip is drawing to a close. And then the terrible follow-up reminder to actually check into the flight 24 hours before its scheduled departure. Each time, it’s the same routine: To check in, I have to manually fill out information like my email address and street address, information that United already has and has had for years, and then I check a box telling them that, yes, I really would like them to save this information for next time so I can, wait for it, save time. But United never saves this information. It just wastes my time, a fun little game we keep playing. And then I’m checked in.

That’s when the math starts, math that will help determine how much sleep I’ll lose tonight. Let’s see, it’s an 8:00 am boarding time, it takes 20 to 30 minutes to take an Uber to the airport, we are technically supposed to be there two hours before boarding time, but we’ve never needed nearly that much time, and so we end up just, yes, wasting time sitting around at the airport. I declare to my wife that perhaps we should leave the apartment at 6:30 am. This, she tells me, is a little aggressive. But we’ve done it before with plenty of time to spare. And I hate wasting time at the airport. She knows this.

I’m flying home with next to nothing, carrying on luggage that would be empty aside from a few small items. There’s just one problem: I need to somehow bring the box for the Copilot+ PC that did finally arrive here in Mexico home so I can later ship that PC back to the company. The box isn’t that big, but it exceeds the dimensions of my carry-on luggage, and so I flattened and folded it and crammed it in there. Meaning that most of the space in my bag is taken up by cardboard. Which is an odd thing to travel with internationally. And will surely result in a curious double-take when it goes through the security scanner.  Potentially wasting some time if I’m asked to explain what it is, exactly, that I’m doing.  I’m expecting some interaction, it is a little weird.

We leave early in the day, but thanks to the wonders of time zones and the unfortunate 90-minute Uber we’ll need to take after we land in Newark, we’ll get home late. It will be almost 10 hours door-to-door if everything goes perfectly, which it never does. This type of day should be, if not relaxing, at least uneventful. But it’s always stressful: Despite a lifetime of travel, the act of traveling exhausts me, and I’ll be a ball of mush by the time we walk through our own door. And then I’ll lose more time, Sunday at least, but probably Monday too, as I try to get caught up.

I don’t like to predict how things might go, am superstitious enough to believe that by expressing a desire that something happens the way I’d prefer that I am preordaining that it will not happen that way. But if all goes well, we’ll be back in Pennsylvania on Saturday night, visiting friends at a favorite hang-out, exhausted by content, happy to see other.

At which point I will start measuring the time until our next trip. Obviously.