To get to the psychiatrist's office I need to take a tram to the stop "Museum für Gestaltung." I have a choice of public transport routes to get there, and to make things easier I usually just ask Google what to do.
My appointment is at 8:30. I aim to leave the house at 7:50, to be safe, but even though I'm nearly always late out the door, I've never arrived more than one or two minutes late to the appointment. So yesterday I left the house at 8 am sharp, walked down one flight of stairs, realized I didn't have my phone, walked back up the stairs and into the apartment, grabbed my phone, and quickly checked Google, which told me that I could walk to the number 4 tram and still arrive at my appointment more or less on time. So, I did: walked to the train station, briefly considered taking a train, decided the tram was more straightforward, waited for the tram, got on the tram, got off the tram, and trotted off to the psychiatrist's office.
Where the clock said 8:44.
Ooooooops.
I was really baffled. I look at my phone *constantly* - how did I manage to miss the fact that 8:30 had long come and gone? Not to mention that there are clocks at the train station, in the tram...this is Switzerland! There are clocks everywhere! Not to mention church bells! It is nearly impossible not to know what time it is! Did I take too long to walk to the station and miss a tram without knowing it? But I walked at my normal pace, which is usually faster than Google's estimates...so why did my phone tell me that I could get there on time with no worries?
So. It turns out that when I'd hurriedly typed "museum für g...." into my phone, I hadn't waited for it to show the tram stop as an option, and I'd just clicked on the name of the museum itself, which for all of last year was *not* actually located at the tram stop "Museum für Gestaltung" but at another building about ten stops further up the tram line. So my phone had told me I could be there by 8:30; in fact I would never have been on time to my appointment, though if I'd hurried my butt up a little I could probably have taken another tram and been five minutes late instead of 15.
The psychiatrist was super nice about it (have I mentioned this guy is a saint?) and said that running drastically late without noticing it was a sign that I was having a relaxed morning. And I guess that's true: if I *had* known that I was going to be late, I would have been stressed the whole way; but as it was, I had a very pleasant journey. Still, I'm not sure this represents real progress towards a new, less anxious me: lack of sleep and over-dependence on technology were definitely also involved. Next week, I'm leaving the house at 7:50, definitely. I'll set a reminder on my phone... 😂
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