Progress.

The neighbours' children, four and six, are candy-coloured noise machines in their winter woollens; bright as bunnies; excitable, alert, and enquiring.

The teenager visits them occasionally, crossing the road to their little white house when their parents go out for dinner or a concert, to babysit them. ('Babysit’ seems obsolete once children pass the age of two or three. Monitors? Too close to surveillance, and therefore creepy. Looks after? Too folksy. Minds? Supervises? Too official. English has multiple words for so many ideas but no satisfactory word for 'guarding' children.)

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The children’s mother had messaged the teenager on one of those closed-community message platforms—virtual village squares without the well. Could you garder les enfants on Tuesday? The teenager didn’t receive the message immediately, possibly being in a class, watching a movie, or sleeping. 

That’s where the trouble starts. You can’t be at that metaphorical village square, loitering like a medieval gossip, all the time. However, the nature of the communication platform assumes that you are; and the sender will continually check for a reply, an action reminiscent of the lonely householder of the past obsessively going to the letterbox to see if the postman has left something … anything! A letter, a postcard, an aerogramme … maybe a small parcel …

(What on earth is an aerogramme?)

It was the following morning when the teenager replied in the affirmative, having surveyed her schedule; school, after-school sport, excursions, part-time job, etcetera. A reply to her reply came that evening: 

Sorry, dinner cancelled.

No one knows whose fault it is when these message exchanges drift towards, and then away from, an endgame. Should one have answered sooner—or, indeed, messaged sooner? Should the sender have issued a reply deadline? Should one take the device to bed? Obviously not. More broadly, is the interregnum forced by the nature of remote conversing causing a deterioration in timely decision-making? 

There was more:

But can you do Friday night instead? We have concert tickets.

Yes, she could: job on.

Thirty hours of messages.

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The Inca Road renovated the earlier Wari system built a thousand years ago, and was ‘conducted over pathless sierras buried in snow; …cut for leagues through living rock; (crossed) rivers…by means of bridges that swung suspended in the air; …scaled (precipices) by stairways hewn out of the native bed; (and) ravines of hideous depths…filled up with solid masonry’. It was used ‘for the rapid transmission of messages. Sentries…at points along the roadway…could transmit messages by…long-distance signalling….by means of which the men, constantly on the watch, could transmit…in an incredibly short time. … a message…for the entire distance of four thousand miles…in six hours’.

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Extracts from W. H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru, 1847; and A. Hyatt Verill, Under Peruvian Skies, 1930. Both cited in The Story of the Road From the Beginning Down to A.D. 1931, J. W. Gregory, 1931.