At 6 am on Friday, my last morning in Japan, I woke up in my hotel room with the smug face of someone who had Planned. I had cleared my hotel bill the previous night so I could check out quickly. I knew which train would take me to Tokyo Station, from where I would board the Narita Express to the airport. I had bought a ticket two days earlier. I even had time for breakfast before heading to the station.
By 8 am, I was standing at the Narita Express platform at Tokyo Station, about 30 minutes before I was to board my airport-bound train. There was nowhere to sit, so I opened my email with the noble intention of reducing the unread count. That’s when I saw an email that had arrived 3 hours earlier: “Notice of Suspension of Reserved Train.” For queries, I could speak to station staff or send them an email, to which they would respond within 24 hours. My flight was to take off in 4 hours.
This is where I should tell you how I had ended up not seeing the email until I was already at the station. I wanted a holiday without work, but not a holiday without the internet. The extreme version of a digital detox—switching off your phone, disappearing from the internet and returning to civilisation after a week—wasn’t possible. I needed the internet for basic holiday infrastructure: to book cabs, check train routes, find restaurants, look up opening hours, use maps, and communicate with hosts.
But there are no separate work and personal apps anymore. So I switched off pop-up notifications for every app, leaving only Airbnb notifications on because most of my experiences were booked there.
On an activity-packed holiday, this seemed like a much more sensible version of a digital detox. I could use the internet when I needed it, but it couldn’t demand my attention whenever it wanted. I thought I had cracked the system for future holidays. What I hadn’t accounted for was information I wouldn’t know I needed until it was too late.
Back at Tokyo station, I went from one information counter to another, channelling the inner Musaddi Lal of Office Office. At one of four travel information counters, a station employee used his phone’s translation app to explain that it had rained the previous night and many trains had been suspended. I could take the Skyliner from Nippori station instead.
I started—rather uselessly—thinking of how much of this I could have prevented if I had simply left my notifications on. I could have looked up alternatives and left the hotel with a plan. Instead, I was now headed to Nippori station like a headless chicken.
But I didn’t lose heart. I had reached early, so I still had time. Or so I thought.
I queued for 20 minutes at Nippori station. When I finally reached the counter, the operator told me the fast train service to the airport wasn’t operating either. There was, however, a slower train that would take about an hour and 20 minutes. “Would that be okay?” she asked. As if I had another option, I thought to myself.
It was 9.15 am. I had planned to reach the airport 3 hours before my flight. Now I would reach one-and-a-half hours prior. I would have to plead my way through the queues… I presented my forex card to buy the ticket. The operator looked at me and said the two words that finally brought everything crashing down: “Cash only.”
I could see the card options displayed at the counter. I had specifically checked the payment options before joining the queue. Nothing suggested that this transaction required cash. I had exhausted all my foreign currency because I was leaving the country—another thing I thought I had been efficient about.
“The ATM is to your left,” said the operator, unfazed. I looked left. There were serpentine queues. I looked behind me. Another queue had formed. At this rate, I would reach the airport just before boarding started.
I had spent more than an hour at Tokyo station two days earlier buying the Narita Express ticket precisely to avoid this kind of last-minute hassle. But “Murphy was Murphying”, as a certain demographic cohort would say.
I walked out, took the escalator down to the exit, found a local cab and reached Narita Airport an hour later. By now, I was also ₹23,000 poorer. The Narita Express, including the reservation, had cost me less than ₹2,000.
Online trying to be Offline
I have been meaning to write a scathing email to JR East about its cavalier attitude towards relaying the suspension information. But I haven’t because I keep wondering: could I have avoided this mayhem had I kept my notifications switched on that morning?
Notifications have become interruptions in our day-to-day lives. We turn them off to preserve our attention, our sleep, our weekends and our holidays. The problem is that being online while trying to be offline is getting increasingly hard: you want to remain connected to the infrastructure of the internet without remaining available to the demands it makes of you. And the two are increasingly difficult to separate.
“If there’s something urgent, someone will call,” we tell ourselves. But this episode made me reckon that notifications aren’t just interruptions. Sometimes they are an early-warning system, surfacing information you don’t know you need.
I spent an entire holiday trying to teach my phone that not everything needed my attention immediately. On my last morning in Japan, it taught me otherwise.