On the downtown F train I’m sitting across from a woman dressed in a colorful, complicated ensemble, consisting of several layers of jackets, lime green tennis shoes and an enormous, rainbow-striped scarf that cascades down from her neck onto her lap and then nearly reaches her feet. She’s holding an open laptop, which is perched precariously on top of a shoulder bag that is itself balanced in her lap, and she’s typing furiously. At some point an alarm sound goes off – a chime I recognize as one I occasionally use on my own iPhone. I try to ignore the sound for a while, then, when it continues, automatically start looking around for the source. I notice that the woman in the scarf has stopped her typing. Is the alarm hers? Did she set an alarm as a reminder for something, then forget about it? She hesitates, as if she’s trying to decide how to proceed; then, shifting her laptop so that it’s clamped between her upper arms and her chin, she begins rifling through the shoulder bag on her lap. Her search is constrained by the laptop, which prevents her from seeing the bag clearly, and limits her arm movement, and the fact that the seats next to her are occupied means that she can’t set the laptop down there. Her increasingly desperate, clumsy ransacking continues – as does the insistent chiming sound – until I exit the train at the next stop.