Pie in the sky

We are walking on a cloud. Or on multiple clouds. For quite some time. It’s a wonder we haven’t fallen down to earth yet. We still might.

Time was, we used to say somebody had his head in the clouds. Meaning he was absentminded or impractical. Nowadays, it pays to have your feet on Mother Earth and everything else in the clouds. Which clouds? Everybody is designing his own cloud. And trying to sell you a piece of it.

Data storage? Put it in the cloud. Old photos? Ditto. How will you retrieve that stuff? Well, if you have your head in the clouds, you could probably just bring your hands up and retrieve that stuff. Really? I’ve had my doubts. But my kids had long ago classed me as a dinosaur. However, even a dinosaur is allowed to have doubts. Say you have a cloud burst. The heavens open up and everything comes raining down. Will your data and photos drop from the sky, too?

You can now visit your doctor in a cloud. People used to go to doctors’ offices or to the hospital if they got sick. Now they don’t want to go there, for fear of getting sick. That’s what happens when life as we know it falls apart, and we are ruled by fear. Sometimes the fear is justified, and sometimes not. One would not want to go to a hospital with a minor complaint these days. But a doctor’s office? If you can’t go to a doctor when you’re sick, when will you go? Or where will you go?

Not to worry. Most doctors have taken adequate safety precautions and try and separate the sick patients from those who are well. Yes, people who are well need to go to the doctor as well. Never heard of well-child visits, or shots? But many doctors have gone above and beyond, and are conducting virtual visits, using telemedicine, on audio-visual platforms. There were docs-in-a-box in the past. Now it’s doc-in-a-cloud. Seriously though, it’s amazing how much can be accomplished without the patient even stepping out of his home!

So the clouds expand. So many people live in clouds and I guess they must inevitably get hungry sometimes. And thus we now have restaurants and kitchens in the cloud. No kidding.

What do you do if you get tired of working for a ride share company? Well, you quit and set up a kitchen in the clouds. That’s what two ex-Uber employees did, teaming up with a professional chef. No, they didn’t rent a spaceship or jump out of an airplane to enter their own cloud. With or without kitchen equipment. No sir. These are modern-day clouds. You get a cook, rustle up a tasty menu or two, team up with an online service and a delivery service, and you are good to go. You have your head in the clouds. Or at least a kitchen in the clouds. Also known as a virtual restaurant.

Dine in? What is that? Especially in the time of the virus. But even before the virus, things were getting cloudy, to use a bad pun. Restaurants are tricky. You rent a place, coughing up major dough, and then you furnish, decorate, set up lighting and music and all that jazz. Before you can even start cooking. And what if you built it and nobody came? Risky stuff. So you forget about a dining hall. Human beings are a pain, as the virus has taught us. Contact with them is best avoided.

Get online baby! Enjoy the cloud. Snazzy website, menus to kill for, take orders online, cook on demand, switch menus on demand, and off goes your delivery guy with mouth-watering delicacies ready to be dropped off at the customer’s door. Throw in a no-touch technique, and you got the virus beat!

Welcome to cloud kitchens! But hey, wait a minute! My cloud with my Thai lunch just blew by in a gust of wind. It’s headed toward Greensboro, I think. And my friend from Winston Salem just texted me. Their Mexican food order is on a cloud which has been blown my way. Let me see if I can snag a bean burrito or two!