At our school everything runs on one computer system: the bell, the doors, the lunch list. One Monday in May the system failed at 7:50. (11) No bell rang, so the first class began when a teacher looked at her watch and said so. The lunch list was gone, so the cooks made the same meal for everybody. Nobody could enter the office downstairs, (12) the door needed a card that no longer worked. The strange part is that the day went well, in a soft and quiet way. (13), several teachers said it was the calmest Monday of the year. A system is there to hold the small choices for us, (14) that day we found out we could still make them.
A phone is not one thing. It is a door to a hundred places, and each one was built by people whose job is to keep you there. (15) A page that never ends has no natural stopping point, so your hand keeps moving. A red dot on the screen is small, (16) it asks a question your brain cannot leave alone: what did I miss? None of this means you are weak or that the people who built them are horrible. (17), it means you are playing against a system built by many people with a great deal of data. The answer is seldom to try harder. It is to change the room: leave the phone downstairs, not upstairs, (18) turn off the dot that asks the question.