So I'm on the train, walking down the aisle looking for a seat. It's always a gamble choosing a stranger to sit next to. First you have to discount the people who don't fit within their allotted space on the seat. There are the people who have their stuff on the seat next to them, and you have to weigh the effort of asking them to move their shit versus trying to find a spot that's already free. There are the people talking on cell phones (and are they just letting a significant other know their ETA, or are they going to be babbling inanities the whole trip?) There are the people that, by the ticket they have out, you can see are going to get off at an early stop. People who are wearing noxious perfumes or worse. You know what I'm talking about.

So I see this girl, sitting on the aisle of a two-seater, with an empty seat next to her. I ask if I can sit. She says, "OK ... I was kinda saving it for someone, but ..."

I ignore her half-hearted protestations. This isn't the high school bus, after all. There's no such thing as a saved seat on the commuter rail. You and your girlfriend should get your acts together and meet up in the station or earlier, if you want to sit together and chatter. You snooze, you lose. So I take the window seat and settle in with my iPod and my reading material.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see the girl looking anxiously at her cell phone, though not using it. A few minutes later, a guy passes by and greets her with a smile. He's kinda-cute-if-you-like-that-kind-of-thing.

"Oh, and I just gave up your seat," she says, disappointed.

"That's OK," he says amiably. "I'll just go ..." he gestures toward the front of the car, and moves on, following the shuffling of people down the rapidly filling train.

The girl hesitates for a moment, then gets up and follows him. A minute later her seat is taken.

I felt a little bad, actually, that she wanted to be with her guy enough that she'd give up her seat. But that feeling soon passed. I had a sudoku to do, after all.

ONE DAY THIS WEEK I was sitting in Kate's cube talking with her, when Scott (developer gone wild) walked by and asked, "Kellnerin, why are you guys missing parts of your cubes?"

"Oh, you mean these holes that we have here?" I gestured to the window in Kate's cube that mirrors the one between Claudia's and mine. "Because there are poor kids in Africa who don't have cubicle walls."

"I see, you're donating your partitions to children in third-world nations?"

"We're just generous that way."

"One Laptop Per Child, One Cubicle Per Child? Thanks to you, groups of four children can have a pod of their very own?"

"That's the idea."

So yes, there's still a window between me and Claudia and we can still wave to each other. Which came in handy when we stayed late on Wednesday to finish some last-minute things for Friday's release.

Mostly it involved watching lots of progress bars. As we waited for things to churn on distant servers, Claudia told me about how she'd recently met a couple in which the wife was in publishing in New York, and how eye-opening it had been. The woman was impressive in many ways, to be sure, but what shocked Claudia was how little computer literacy was valued in that world.

"Oh, of course it's not important; they have assistants for that kind of thing." I told her about my first boss, who didn't have a computer in her office, whose letters I not only typed and sent, but whose email I checked, printed out, and wrote.

But even after I wasn't an assistant anymore, there were times when I'd bring work home and D would exclaim, "Why are you doing this?" By which he meant, "Why is a human doing this? Why is it not automated in some way?" For instance, why does a human have to re-check an index when a book is updated for the 17th edition and correct all the page numbers, when it could have been updated by a computer? And I could only reply "That's how this is done."

Anyway, after the progress bars all reached their ends, and I'd emailed the appropriate parties to inform them, I headed out. I called D from the train station to let him know where I was. It was about 9:30 or so.

D wondered what I'd been doing so late, so I explained about the progress bars and the whatnot, and he said, "Why is this not automated? If it's part of the product it should be part of the nightly build ..." and so on.

And I found myself explaining about the stupid tools we use and the manual steps that we have to go through and how it takes forever to go through the whole process and how we have to QA the stuff anyway and fix things, which is what I had been doing, and how it's necessarily last minute because it depends on the doc being finished which depends on the product being final, and so on ... "That's how it is done," I said.

"That's stupid," he contended.

I agreed it sucked.

"Well, come home soon," he said.

"As soon as the next train leaves here."

The train was announced as soon as I had gotten some food. As I took my seat and the train pulled out of the station, I realized that when whenever D asks, "Why isn't this automated?" he means, "Why do you have to work so hard and why can't you come home; I miss you."

(I missed him, too. It took far too long getting home.)