Miller shoved the rubber cup of the plunger against the porcelain with a rhythmic, wet thud, his forehead pressed against the cold cinderblock wall of the East Wing bathroom. The water in the bowl was a murky, stagnant grey, refusing to yield to the pressure. Miller, who had spent the better part of Monday morning wrestling with the plumbing of a thirty-year-old correctional facility, didn’t even look up when I walked in. He just kept at it, his shoulders bunched under a grease-stained jumpsuit.

In a prison education center, the hierarchy of urgency is dictated by the potential for a riot. A clogged toilet in a housing unit is a four-alarm fire because a man who cannot flush his own waste is a man with a very specific, very loud grievance. A flickering fluorescent light in the GED hallway is a medium-tier annoyance.

But the security ticket I had submitted six weeks ago-the one regarding the blind spot in the north corner of the computer lab-sat at the absolute bottom of Miller’s digital pile.

The Hierarchy of Urgency

“

“I’ll get to it, Jax,” he grunted, the plunger finally catching a seal. “But the cameras don’t smell. The cameras don’t flood the captain’s office. The cameras are quiet.”

– Miller, Facilities Maintenance

He wasn’t wrong,

I once made the mistake of believing that the more screens I owned, the more life I was living. I purchased two tablets, a high-refresh monitor, and a specialized bracket that allowed my smartphone to hover exactly four inches from my nose.

I told myself this was an investment in joy. I believed that by eliminating the physical gap between myself and the world’s sporting events, I was maximizing my capacity for relaxation. I was wrong. I had not created a temple of leisure; I had built a makeshift air traffic control tower in my bedroom. I was not a fan enjoying a game; I was a frantic operator managing a data stream.

The Suwon Grid

This mistake-the conflation of access with enjoyment-is the defining error of the modern Saturday. In a small apartment in Suwon, a man named Ji-hoon is currently repeating my error, though his methods are more analog. It is 9:30 a.m. Ji-hoon has a printed sheet of paper taped to the inside of his kitchen cabinet.

This is not a grocery list or a set of emergency numbers. It is a grid. He has used two different colors of ballpoint pen to map out the next fourteen hours of his life.