Scene: Registration Desk, Moderately Priced Motel
Characters:
Registration clerk, a late middle-aged woman
Self-employed professional woman in late twenties
Clerk: “Name and address here. Sign here, please, and please put down your place of employment, also.”
Professional woman: “My home address is my place of work.”
Clerk: “No, I mean, where do you go to work. That’s the address for that line.”
Professional woman: “Home and work addresses are the same.”
Clerk: “Where do you drive to everyday? Where is your boss?”
Professional woman: “I don’t have a boss. I’m self-employed.”
Clerk: “Well, I’ll just make up an address for that.”
Professional woman: “Why?”
Clerk: “If I don’t have a business address, I can’t give you the tax-free rate.”
Professional woman: “I think I can pay the $7.00 tax.”
Clerk: “If that’s what you want.”
This is a version of a true story. The clerk, living and working in the twenty-first century, could not understand the concept of “working at home.” For the clerk, there is a workplace and a homeplace, and they are distinctly different places because that is how the clerk sees place.
For the professional, home and work are the same place, and yet, not the same. Connected by phone and other electronic means of communication, the professional woman can be home and in multiple places.
We are already in the midst of a new concept of place, maybe not for the clerk, but for many who are “connected.” For the clerk, there’s the Newtonian macroworld where bilocation is impossible: Things are where they are. For the professional woman, there’s the quantum-like world where places are entangled, and bilocation and even polylocation are possible. The conception of place as a single, easily identifiable realm with exact dimensions and coordinates inhibits people like the clerk from this new understanding and reality of place. The clerk lives in a real world, a macroworld that is an aggregation of places. So does the professional woman. But the latter also lives in that quantum-like world where place, or location, is radically different from that of the macroworld.
Characters:
Registration clerk, a late middle-aged woman
Self-employed professional woman in late twenties
Clerk: “Name and address here. Sign here, please, and please put down your place of employment, also.”
Professional woman: “My home address is my place of work.”
Clerk: “No, I mean, where do you go to work. That’s the address for that line.”
Professional woman: “Home and work addresses are the same.”
Clerk: “Where do you drive to everyday? Where is your boss?”
Professional woman: “I don’t have a boss. I’m self-employed.”
Clerk: “Well, I’ll just make up an address for that.”
Professional woman: “Why?”
Clerk: “If I don’t have a business address, I can’t give you the tax-free rate.”
Professional woman: “I think I can pay the $7.00 tax.”
Clerk: “If that’s what you want.”
This is a version of a true story. The clerk, living and working in the twenty-first century, could not understand the concept of “working at home.” For the clerk, there is a workplace and a homeplace, and they are distinctly different places because that is how the clerk sees place.
For the professional, home and work are the same place, and yet, not the same. Connected by phone and other electronic means of communication, the professional woman can be home and in multiple places.
We are already in the midst of a new concept of place, maybe not for the clerk, but for many who are “connected.” For the clerk, there’s the Newtonian macroworld where bilocation is impossible: Things are where they are. For the professional woman, there’s the quantum-like world where places are entangled, and bilocation and even polylocation are possible. The conception of place as a single, easily identifiable realm with exact dimensions and coordinates inhibits people like the clerk from this new understanding and reality of place. The clerk lives in a real world, a macroworld that is an aggregation of places. So does the professional woman. But the latter also lives in that quantum-like world where place, or location, is radically different from that of the macroworld.
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