So I got nothing done today. Well, not nothing — I filed the invoices I'd been putting off since February and I fixed a broken redirect on this very blog that's apparently been sending people to a 404 since sometime last year (sorry, whoever you were, if you're still reading). But the actual work, the paying kind, mostly did not happen, because a container ship called the Ever Given got wedged sideways across the Suez Canal this morning and I have spent an unreasonable number of hours watching it not move.
Here's the thing that got me. There are websites that just show you, live, where every big ship on earth is. VesselFinder. MarineTraffic. I poked around one of these years ago out of idle curiosity and completely forgot it existed until a friend sent me a link this morning, and I did not leave the tab for the rest of the day. You can watch little boat icons stack up on both ends of the canal in real time, dozens of them already, oil tankers and container ships just sitting there in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea with nowhere to go. There's something hypnotic about watching global trade grind to a halt one pixel at a time, on a map, from a couch in my apartment, in my pajama pants, at eleven in the morning.
The Ever Given is genuinely enormous, one of the biggest container ships in the world, operated by Evergreen Marine out of Taiwan, on its way from Malaysia to Rotterdam when a gust of wind reportedly spun it broadside and drove it into both banks of the canal at once. Egyptian officials are already saying this could take days to sort out. That canal handles something like ten or twelve percent of global trade, so "a few days" is not a small sentence, and somewhere right now there's a guy whose entire job today is refloating a boat roughly the length of the Chrysler Building using a couple of tugs and a dredger. I hope somebody is paying him an absolute fortune.
What I keep coming back to is how this is the internet doing the thing it's actually good at, the thing we don't talk about enough because we're too busy being annoyed at it for everything else. Nobody built an app for this. Some shipping-industry data feed that's existed for years, meant for insurers and port authorities and logistics nerds, is suddenly the most compelling thing on my screen, more compelling than actual news coverage, because it's just raw and unfiltered and slow. No commentary track. No urgency, no scroll of hot takes, just boats. It reminded me a little of the early Chrome ChromeCast weather-map obsession I had back around 2013, minus the part where anyone actually needed the information.
My one gripe, and it's a small one: half the news articles I clicked through today used a stock photo of a completely different ship, because nobody had a decent picture of the actual Ever Given yet. Small thing. Bugs me anyway. If you're going to run a story with a giant boat as the hero image, at least go find the right giant boat.
I don't have a grand point here about supply chains or globalization or any of that, and I'm not going to pretend I do. I just spent a workday staring at a map because a boat got stuck sideways in a canal, and it turns out that's a genuinely fun way to spend a Tuesday, in the same dumb way flight-tracking sites are fun during a layover, watching some plane you're not on cross an ocean you're not crossing. I'll check back on it tomorrow. I suspect a lot of people will.