Inspiration
There’s something about the monotony of life that brings about the essence of creativity. Boredom: when one’s eyes glaze over and the stimuli of the surrounding environment fade as one’s thoughts kick into gear and begin to race. In this instance, however, it may very well be that my mind was thinking of racing…
F.N.F.
I don’t know what it is about grocery stores, if it is the people there, or the sight of neatly packaged items lining shelves, or the smells of meats and fresh vegetables and the food court along the way, but I often find myself in a zone of thought in a grocery store. Perhaps it is due to the simple drudgery of routine, the weekly or bi-weekly trip to the store to pick up a few heads of broccoli, a filet of salmon, a bundle of meat… a trip that does not necessarily bring about any jolts of excitement or surprise, unless it’s a very good sale on ice cream or beef jerky.
It was on a nondescript Sunday morning, at the local grocery store which I will anonymize as Wholesome Foods, when the thought first occurred to me. I was granted the privilege to steer the shopping cart, and as my wife was shopping the produce and looking for the sweetest of berries, I devolved into a child again and pretended to be a racer. With shoppers on all sides, I expertly weaved through the aisles, disregarding any non-existent yet fully present stop signs or stop lights in my path. I did not even use any turn signals, which places me more in the style of a New York City driver as opposed to that of a Long Island driver. Regardless, I was driving fiend, operating my vehicle at reckless speeds of three and a half to four miles per hour.
Now, the problem with solitaire racing is the distinct lack of competition that makes the activity exciting. All around me are non-player racers (NPRs) who are there simply to shop and get groceries and go about their day; how lovely would it be to have rivals throughout the store – a Senna weaving through the vegetable aisle as Produce Maxx rains down to cover the greenery in a fine mist, or a Lauda braving the heat of the hot bar as he navigates through the tight chicanes. Instead, with just me, myself, and I, the drive becomes a dull affair indeed.
And then, as I braked suddenly to avoid oncoming traffic, it occurred to me: a way to liven up the morning, to jostle the joints and pump up the blood that previously ran sluggish in my veins.
Two words: Full Roam. Let’s start with a definition.
Full Roam: a state of vehicle operation during which the operator maintains the speed of their vehicle without any perceptible acceleration or deceleration.
The challenge of Full Roam is not to be understated. When a driver operates Full Roam, they must keep the speed of their shopping cart constant without any sudden breaks or accelerations. This means that the driver must always be perceptive of their surroundings, of any NPRs who might cut into their path and ruin an otherwise stellar race. Not only that, there arise further hurdles in the form of non-player employees (NPEs) who are busy tidying up the race scape by stocking shelves or unloading boxes. It’s not uncommon for a raceway to suddenly become blocked off by a combination NPR-NPE attack.
I began practicing as Full Roam racer, starting by downshifting from Gear 3 (3 mph) to Gear 1 (1 mph). I was able to maintain this as we moved from produce to the carnivore section of Wholesome Foods. No, it didn’t come easy, but as I have often had practice racing in grocery stores starting from early childhood, it wasn’t much of a transition either. As an aside, is also important to note that your team engineer who helps load the cargo (groceries) during your race cannot do it alone. The racer themself has to take an active role as well, lest the race ends with a cargo full of healthy junk. So, there I was operating the vehicle with one hand at middle position and the other hand loading up goods, all while keeping steady at Gear 1.
I started to feel confident – one might say overconfident – as I decided to raise the bar of the challenge with Fixed Angle.
Fixed Angle: a state of vehicle operation during which the operator maintains the angular speed of their vehicle without any perceptible angular acceleration or deceleration.
Fixed Angle, per se, is not particularly difficult. A Fixed Angle racer operating not under the constriction of Full Roam can rapidly accelerate or decelerate in the forward-backward axis, and need only keep a fixed degree-per-second (DPS) for turns. Easy-peasy. Now, while I was operating Full Roam, I used the wristy-jerky technique to avoid collisions, but this violated the fixed DPS constraint of Fixed Angle. There’s a fine balance of the Full Roam – Fixed Angle driver, as by locking in both linear and angular speed, this necessarily limits the racer to a minimal radius of curvature (ROC). To minimize ROC, one would need to operate at a low gear and high DPS, but too high of DPS can lead to wheel lockup and iatrogenic collision, especially if burdened by an imbalance of groceries.
Now, the perceptive racer (reader) will recognize the near impossibility of operating their shopping cart Full Roam – Fixed Angle during the Checkout Process (CP). Indeed, traffic during CP comes to a standstill in the NPR-NPE exchange. Therefore, the racer must have the foresight to start the race with a speed diminished enough so that they can still maintain that speed through CP, as the only way to complete CP successfully is to utilize the turn-in-place (TIP) maneuver.
Theoretically, using the TIP technique, with proper calculation of the limits of ROC, one can turn in a circle infinitely provided there is sufficient room to maneuver. Unfortunately, this is usually not the case in a NPE-led checkout lane, such that from a mathematic perspective the only possibility of victory is via the self-checkout line. That being said, a racer must take care to inform the NPRs to leave a wide berth fore and aft lest the infinite-circle technique causes a crash.
At this point, I was feeling giddy as the otherwise boring grocery trip had by now morphed into a scintillating race in which I pushed the limits of my physical and mental barriers. Indeed, I attempted a couple of test laps around the race course and found the dairy section to neutralize my capacity for Full Roam – Fixed Angle – and I hadn’t even attempted infinite circling in checkout!
Even facing this setback, I wanted to test the boundaries of human determination by adding one final restriction to this challenge: No Turn.
No Turn: a state of vehicle operation during which the operator is limited to only left turns (No Turn – Left) or right turns (No Turn – Right), but not both.
The term No Turn is a misnomer, as it does not mean that a racer cannot turn at all, only that they are limited to turning one way or another. In my case, as a right-favoring racer, I decided upon No Turn – right for the final component of this challenge. Combining Full Roam, No Turn, and Fixed Angle, we get F.N.F – the pinnaccle of the grocery store racing series.
With the final 10 or 15 minutes allotted to my race, before my race engineer (wife) called the race off, I practiced racing under F.N.F. limitations. It became apparent to me that No Turn introduced an immense difficulty to an already tricky challenge; if one takes a corner at the wrong angle, it can be impossible to load up on a grocery from the far aisle. There are two solutions: to initiate a TIP, if space permitted, or to perform three right turns to loop back into the aisle of interest. While the former option is more palatable, the restrictions in space made the latter option more practical.
Although we took the route of self-checkout, I suddenly felt a twinge of self-consciousness as it seemed as if the gaze of nearby NPEs and NPRs were upon me. I decided against performing infinite circles in the checkout lane. We scanned the groceries uneventfully, bagged them up, put the bags into the shopping cart, and left the race course behind.
Reflection
It was later on in the week, when I was working with my boss – the “program director” – when he asked me offhand whether I had been shopping at the Wholesome Foods the Sunday past. My mind raced back in time to that silly episode when I was turning my car into circles in a vain attempt to navigate through the store F.N.F. style. If my boss noticed anything funny at the time, as he had recognized me at the store, he possessed the tact and the restraint not to laugh in my face then or now at work.