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in my phone had gotten loose, and so my phone only worked when I was pressing on this plastic tab with my finger. As a result, I could only make calls, not receive them. And if I took my finger off the tab mid-call, the call dropped.
    The tab is little more valuable than the plastic equivalent of a soda can’s pull tab, which it resembles in appearance, and is roughly as essential for the proper functioning of the device it’s attached to. I was out of warranty; protocol was that I was out of luck and needed a new, multi-hundred-dollar phone. “But this tab weighs one gram and costs a penny to manufacture,” I said. “I know,” said the customer service rep.
    There was
no
way, no way at all, I couldn’t just purchase a tab from them?
    “I don’t think it will work,” she said. “But let me talk to a manager.”
    Then
the same woman
got back on the line. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But …” I said. And we kept talking. “Well, let me talk to a
senior
manager, hold on,” she says.
    As I’m holding, I feel my hand, which has now been pushing down steadily on the plastic tab for about fifteen minutes, begin to cramp. If my finger slips off the tab, if she hits the wrong button on her console, if there is some glitch in my phone provider’s network, or hers—I am anonymous again. Anybody. A nobody. A number. This particular person and I will never reconnect.
    I must call again, introduce myself again, explain my problem again, hear again that protocol is against me, plead my case again.
    Service works by the gradual buildup of sympathy through failed attempted solutions. If person X has told you to try something and it doesn’t work, person X feels slightly sorry for you. X is slightly
responsible
for the problem now, having used up some of your time. Person Y, however, is considerably less moved that you tried following her colleague X’s advice to no avail—even if it is the same advice thatshe herself would have given you had she been party to that earlier conversation. That’s beside the point. The point is that she wasn’t the one who gave you that advice. So she is not responsible for your wasted time.
    The
same
woman, as if miraculously, again returns. “I can make an exception for you,” she says.
    It occurs to me that an “exception” is what programmers call it when software breaks.
50 First Dates
    Sometimes even a single, stable point of view, a unifying vision and style and taste, isn’t enough. You also need a
memory
. In the 2004 comedy
50 First Dates
, Adam Sandler courts Drew Barrymore, but in the process discovers that due to an accident she can’t form new long-term memories.
    Philosophers interested in friendship, romance, and intimacy more generally have, in recent times, endeavored to distinguish between the
types
of people we like (or, the things we like
about
people) and the
specific
people we feel connections with in our lives. University of Toronto philosopher Jennifer Whiting has dubbed the former “impersonal friends.” The difference between the numerous “impersonal friends” out there, who are more or less fungible, and the few individuals we care about
specifically
, who aren’t fungible with anyone on the planet, lies, she says, in so-called “historical properties.” Namely, your actual friends and your innumerable “impersonal friends”
are
fungible—but only at the moment the relationship begins. From there, the relationship puts down roots, builds up a shared history, shared understanding, shared experiences, sacrifices and compromises and triumphs …
    Barrymore and Sandler really
are
good together—life-partner good—but she becomes “someone special” to him, whereas he is doomed to remain merely “her type.” Fungible. And therefore—beingno different from the
next
charming and stimulating and endearing guy who shows up at her restaurant
—vulnerable
to losing her.
    His solution: give her a historical-properties crash course every morning,