Everything Moved Online in a Month
I am writing this from a quiet house in a quiet city. The diner I run, Blue Line Grille, does takeout through a window now. The menu, the ordering, the payment — all of it moved to phones in about two weeks, because there was no other way to stay open.
The same two weeks happened everywhere at once. Schools became video calls. Doctor visits became video calls. Offices became a grid of faces, and the systems underneath — built over twenty years for a world that mostly met in person — were asked to carry everything, immediately.
Mostly, the tools held. That may be the untold story of this month: the unglamorous infrastructure — the networks, data centers, and cloud systems — absorbed in days what was supposed to take years.
When this passes, some things will go back. But twenty years of “someday we will digitize that” just happened in a month, and habits formed under pressure do not fully unwind. The QR code on the table is staying. So is the expectation that any business can be reached, ordered from, and paid without touching anything but a phone.