Low: Why segways might be ruining the world

When I first heard about segways, I loved them. It made me feel like we might actually progress to the level of the Jetsons sometime in my lifetime after all. Suddenly I was imaging personal trips to the moon, or robots that would do my laundry and listen into conference calls, all while I lie in bed with bowls of Honey Bunches of Oats and binge on episodes of Californication. Is it possibly telling that the first thing I could imagine in a futuristic society is more opportunity to skip out on doing even the slightest bit of work? That could just be because I loosely consider myself a writer, and people who know anything about writers should know that we can’t really do anything, to paraphrase a Seinfeld quote that also works for comedians. Even now, as I see people zoom around city streets with their ridiculous, Mohawk-style helmets, they look incredibly practical – particularly for sight-seeing. But then that all changed one sunny afternoon on the way to Ralph’s, on a day that will forever live in infamy in my mind. Whipping by me on this particular day was a behemoth of a man, roughly my age, whose considerable girth was causing a significant strain on the poor plastic that was holding him up as he zoomed by. The image was as obvious as that lame parable about the apple landing on Newton's head. With the proliferation of segways, even people in the city that normally walk on a regular basis might be turning in their New Balance walking shoes for loafers not designed for distances of more than a quarter-mile. And how long until Sketchers comes out with a shoe that claims to sculpt your ass and legs, all from the comfort of standing on a segway? But then again, efficiency has become the God of the new age, and we’re forever throwing away bits of humanity to get us faster from point A to point B. Once you've seen a guy at a urinal on a segway, you might start changing your mind too.