Tangelos!
On human ingenuity and our strange willingness to live with ridiculous problems.
My friend has a phrase he deploys whenever someone explains why an obviously fixable problem cannot, in fact, be fixed.
“Of course we can fix that,” he’ll say. “We can make tangelos.”
I remember the first time I heard this and thinking, Yes, of course. Tangelos.
I almost never think about tangelos. They occupy the same mental shelf as dragonfruit and kumquats: fruits I encounter infrequently and regard with mild respect. Yet there they are, proof that human beings somehow looked at two different citrus fruits and said, “What if these became one?”
And voila! Human brainpower made it happen.
We can create hybrid fruit, transplant hearts, and place telescopes in space that allow us to peer billions of years into the past. Yet we routinely encounter websites that refuse to accept a perfectly valid password and printers that interpret a simple request as a personal attack.
One of the most human things we do is simultaneously achieve the extraordinary and tolerate the ridiculous.
The absurdities persist because most of us adapt. We keep a list of passwords in a notebook. We know which elevator button sticks. We learn that the light switch in the guest room must be jiggled. We tell stories about these inconveniences as though they were weather patterns rather than solvable problems. We simply don’t seem to have the bandwidth to deal with ignorable circumstances
Whenever I encounter an inconvenience that everyone has simply accepted, I now hear my friend’s voice in my head.
“Of course we can fix that. We can make tangelos.”