I’d like to talk about another tidbit of self discovery which occurred, of all places, at a Tesla Supercharger.
Over the course of the nearly 160,000 miles I’ve driven my Tesla, I’ve visited my share of charging stations. Most of them are in clean, safe areas, sometimes even with cool stuff to see and do nearby.
I had to pick up some family members on Sunday at midnight from the Oakland airport. For those of you not familiar with the Bay Area, Oakland is kind of the shithole of the region. I knew there was a supercharger about eight miles from the airport in a safe shopping mall, but I noticed there was a new one much closer, so I decided to go there instead, to this shit-ass neighborhood (actually, when they are this bad, I think they are called a “community“):
Now, this wasn’t a war zone or anything, but it was pretty damned nasty. In fact, if I was so bored that I had time to research it beforehand, I might have bothered to look at some reviews of the station, which were along these lines:
But I didn’t. And, in fact, I did “stop there after dark” in order to charge up the car and wait for the plane to arrive.
For those unacquainted with charging a Tesla, let me bring up a very important point. To charge the car, you:
- Press the Unlock Charge Port button on the screen;
- Get out of your car;
- Plug the charging cable into your car;
- Get back into your car (assuming you’re staying there) and wait.
When you are done with the charge, you repeat the exact same steps, except for #3 in which you unplug the cable. But the point is that when you’re plugged in, you can’t go anywhere. You are tethered to the charger, and the one and only way to become mobile again is to get out or your car to unplug it. Without doing this, you are not going to get that car to move. Ever.
It occurs to me that some of our fine fellow citizens might use this knowledge to good effect, since anyone charging a Tesla, particularly at night and alone, is a sitting duck. All you have to do is wander up to their window, tap on it with your gun, and tell them what you want (up to and including, I suppose, the car itself). You can’t tell them to fuck off, slam on the accelerator, and make a getaway (perhaps, if you’re so inclined, doing a 180 and running them over before you depart). Nope. You are absolutely stuck there until such time as you untether yourself, which requires leaving your vehicle.
None of this ever really occurred to me until I was at this place, because I was somewhat nervously watching the area and noticing some not-terribly-savory people wandering around. One guy did in fact come up to my car and pulled the usual, “Scuse me, sir, can you spare……….” schtick. I shook my head no, and luckily he just walked away. I realized how lucky I was that he was passive about the entire thing, and I felt incredibly helpless.
I kept working while I was there, constantly keeping one eye on the area around me. I finally decided to leave a little early and give myself some peace, so I got out of my car and went over to unplug it. Let me tell you now that I looked like a total dork at the time: I was wearing beige shorts, had some reading glasses on, and topped it off by struggling with getting the plug out of the car. I was muttering to it then I heard, a short distance away, “Get get ’em, boy.” I looked over, and there were some young men in a car about fifteen feet away. I wasn’t sure what they were trying to say, but I think their general idea was, hey, look at this goofy middle-aged clown. I was once again glad they did, let’s say, all leap out of the car and beat the shit out of me.
I drove away feeling foolish and, frankly, a little angry, both at the world and myself. How could I have been careless enough to expose myself like that? Why would I stay at a place where I felt uneasy? How could I put myself in such a position of vulnerability in which I could have been harmed or killed?
In spite of all my self-deprecation, I have a fairly elevated sense of my own self-worth. I think everything in life falls on a bell curve, and the notion that all people are created equal is cute, but just plain wrong. Does anyone honestly think that Elon Musk is the same value and worth as any of those people I saw in that parking lot?
I also live a life in which I have responsibilities. Responsibilities to my family. And, indeed, responsibilities to you, the person who is reading this. I honestly don’t know what a lot of Slopers would do without Slope, which is why I keep working on the damned thing, now in its 18th year. There’s no place like it.
Judged objectively, what is my own life worth compared to, say, a criminal living in that area? Twice as much? Ten times? A hundred? More? I’d guess a lot more. In a raw economic and social utilitarianism sense, I made an entirely irrational decision by placing someone – – me – – at risk, whose responsibilities dwarf anything that the people crawling around that area could comprehend. I was being a fool, and I don’t like being a fool. Nor do I like being afraid. I managed to achieve both.
This is particularly on my mind since I believe we are collectively heading into an increasingly dark age, and one in which my duty to protect myself and my family is only going to increase. We aren’t all one big happy human family. There are bad people out there. Stupid people. Reckless people. Mentally ill people. And I’m not going to stir me or my family into that collective soup just to see what happens. The distances need to remain great, and the walls need to remain high. To do otherwise would be a dereliction of duty.
Let’s just say it was a wake-up call, and I won’t be going back. I have led a remarkably sheltered life, and my street sense is sometimes quite rusty. As Don Vito said in the first Godfather, men cannot afford to be careless. I was careless, and I’m glad it didn’t cost me. Because if someone is going to be banging a sign into my front yard about whose life matters, I know what the unpopular but correct answer is.
Mine.
