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Episode transcript:

Sometimes you didn’t get what you want or what you need, so the Rolling Stones could eat it, as far as Linda was concerned.

She had looked up Viva Coco, and it was a series of Trance Dance Parties that stopped 12 years ago at a club that had moved 3 times since than, and recently closed down. Linda wasn’t big into clubbing anyway.

After a pep talk from Brian — “A regular schedule keeps you honest, babe” — Linda decided that she was going to open the pizza place every day this week. And that she was going to stop participating is Weather Choose forever.

Brian said he’d help her unsubscribe from the app, but after following the help pages around in a circle for an hour, he declared it “dark patterns” and told Linda to email the help desk. “Or you could just … you know, do the choose.”

Linda sighed and said she would email, and then just hid the app on the last screen of her watch face so she wouldn’t have to see the growing red notification number.

Business was going well, though. Linda didn’t really have any regulars anymore, because even at her best, she had been opening pretty erratically. Other people are lothe to plan around “open when I feel like it.”

But her storefront was well-placed to catch a lot of walk-in traffic. Unfortunately, one of those walk-ins was Button.

“Listen. I’ll call the cops if you’re stalking me,” Linda said the first day he came in. She snapped an unflattering picture of him on her watch. “There’s a record!”

It’s not stalking, he told her. If she checked the terms and conditions of the Weather Aboveground app, she’d know that she was entitled to a Special Customer Liaison should she run into difficulty participating in the daily Weather Choose. “It’s free of charge!”

“My difficulty,” said Linda, “is that I just don’t want to. Please don’t say that you’re here to help me want to.”

She tried to remember some of the moves Miriam had showed her from a Women’s defense course that Miriam had taken a few years earlier. Linda was unnerved by the fact that everything about the idea of this encounter felt threatening, but Button himself turned every interaction into a helpful sales call. As outlined by the EULA, section 12-B, desire was, in fact, an area Button could offer to help in, but enthusiastic consent on Linda’s behalf would be required to proceed.

“I have a boyfriend,” said Linda, feeling incredibly lost.

And this was how it went: The world’s most boring stalemate. Button would come in, order a slice, and Linda would slightly burn it out of passive aggression. He’d then say, “It’s the conversation we’re all having,” but then not much else until close. If Linda asked him to leave, he’d leave. But he’d be back again the next day.

After a few days of mostly ignoring him, Linda finally asked, “Why is this so important to you? The weather used to just happen.”

Button snapped to attention. “I’m so glad you asked. It’s not just important to me. A lot of effort and man-hours and, let’s say it, money went into creating and implementing this technology, for all of us! Now it’s something that really brings us together. Weather Aboveground is so proud of its 100% participation rate, and we’re proud of the joy and ease that we bring into the lives of our members. It means we had a vision of the future, and it came true!”

This speech enraged Linda. She didn’t need this. She didn’t ask for this. The future was a story rich people sold, and to pretend differently was just … insulting.

“I can’t vote,” she said. “I lost my watch.”

She unfastened her watch, threw it to the ground, and stamped on it hard. That didn’t quite do it. At least she knew she had done some sound research into which models were the most durable, but that wasn’t helping make her point. So she scooped it off the floor and chucked it into the pizza oven.

“Stop coming to my store!” she yelled in Button’s face.