dumber scooters — and i looked into them, briefly, from a distance

an electric scooter went past me on the sidewalk and i nodded like i understood it. dumber scooters is a search i typed into a phone with a cracked screen. i walk everywhere. walking is the original scooter. the nine minute snooze is the original engine.

writing this between two jira tickets that both say “blocked, awaiting input from finance”. the input from finance is not coming. it is tuesday, 10:14am. nobody upstairs has emailed me in two hours — in this building, that counts as a permission slip.

so. dumber scooters. i typed those two words into the search bar with the wrong thumb, on a phone with a hairline fracture from when i sat on it in 2023. i sat with the results for nine minutes — nine being the unit my brain uses for everything, because of the snooze button.

dumber scooters: a class of small electric or kick scooters marketed, ironically or not, as the simplest version of the thing — fewer screens, fewer apps, fewer reasons to look down. i looked into them from my desk. i do not own one. i walk. walking is, as far as i can tell, the original dumber scooter, with feet.

A SCOOTER. IS A WHEEL. WITH A STICK.

i’m neutral on the scooter — the most generous position a man at a desk can hold on any object he doesn’t own. i’m just trying to figure out whether dumber is the bug or the feature.

dumber scooters, my best guess at what they are

dumber scooters, as a category, are the ones that strip the smart parts off. no app. no bluetooth. no leaderboard for how many blocks you scooted today. you push a button. it goes. you push it again. it stops. that is the entire interface, and i will tell you, with no irony, that this is possibly the most beautiful product description i’ve read this year.

the smart scooter, by contrast, has a thing on the handlebar that tells you your average velocity. average. velocity. on a scooter. it pings your phone at 23% battery — a number i recognize, intimately, from the phone in my pocket — and asks if you’d like to “begin a journey”. i would not. journeys are what other men do, and the word makes me itchy.

so the dumber model has done me the favor of getting out of the way. it is the toaster of the sidewalk. the broom with a motor.

why the scooter is dumber than the bicycle, allegedly

online, between scooter people and bicycle people, there is a debate about who gets to feel correct on a saturday. the bicycle people say the bicycle is the rational choice. gears. the word velocipede in its history, which, you have to admit, is a sentence with a tie on.

the scooter people point at the saddle, the spandex, the helmet that costs as much as a microwave (i’d know — i’m on the seventh), and say: look at all this. the scooter, they say, is the sane vehicle. stand. go. stop. on the scooter is a person in jeans, mildly embarrassed, going seven miles an hour past a man named gerald walking his dog.

both arguments are compelling, both irrelevant to me. but if dumber means fewer decisions before leaving the house, the scooter wins, and dumber is winning.

why my bicycle is dumbest of all, since i walk

i own a bicycle. it leans against the corridor wall between the kitchen and the desk i sit at. it has been there since 2022. one tire has been flat so long the rubber has taken on the shape of the floor. it’s a topographical bicycle now.

i bought it during a brief period in which i believed i’d bike to work. then i learned the route involves a hill, and hills are an argument i keep losing. so the bicycle stays. it judges silently, which i prefer to the way the dishwasher judges, because at least the bicycle isn’t running.

a scooter at seven miles an hour beats a bicycle at zero. math is unkind here. the hierarchy of where i fit on the dum, dumb, and dumber scale was settled, sort of, by tuesday — pedestrian division.

i walk. walking is the original scooter — leg is the wheel, foot is the brake, hip is the suspension, knee is the warning light. firmware stable. user manual one page, mostly drawings.

the snooze before the commute, every nine minutes

the nine minute snooze is, structurally, the same idea as the dumber scooter. fewer features. fewer decisions. one button. one outcome. the snooze button does not ask what kind of morning i’d like. it does not propose a journey. it gives me, again, nine minutes. yesterday i hit it five times. forty five minutes, distributed over six conscious moments. a clean trade.

i had a smart clock briefly in 2021 — the kind that lets you set custom snooze intervals. it ruined my mornings. i would lie awake at 5:50, choosing minutes, because choice at 5:50am is a wound. the dumb clock, with its fixed nine, gave me back the morning. dumber, in this case, was kinder.

some product manager, somewhere, is drafting a slide that says “what if scooter, but snooze”. give it a year.

the plants take, briefly, on owning vs riding

i looked over at the plant on my desk. brenda — dead since spring 2023 — has not moved. plants are silent landlords. they sit in your apartment, do not pay rent, take the good light, outlast three of your relationships. they ask nothing and give you nothing back except, occasionally, a leaf. a leaf is a receipt for being alive in the same room.

brenda’s opinion on the scooter, as i interpret it through her dry, brittle silhouette, is: why buy a thing that goes places when you cannot reliably go places. she has watched me leave the apartment twelve times this month without keys. she said nothing. brenda would not buy a scooter.

so the plant take: owning a scooter is a contract with motion. renting is a contract with the app. walking is a contract with the leg. standing still in a sunny window for six years is a contract with the room. all four valid. only one has brenda’s dignity. (the running log, if you want a slower read, is the dumb diary i have been keeping, technically.)

verdict, the scooter is fine and i remain pedestrian

a slack notification just buzzed. it’s a thread about whether the printer needs new toner. i’m going to keep not opening it. somewhere two people are negotiating who buys the toner. i wish them well.

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