It was a weekday afternoon, and the adorable sandwich-and-smoothie shop was packed.

“I’ve never seen it this busy,” I told the cute counter girl as she brought me my curried egg salad sandwich. She was wearing a Guns ‘n’ Roses baseball shirt with its sleeves cut off and a bandana around her head.

“Welcome to the Jungle” was the theme song at my junior prom, and bandanas were huge throughout my summer-camp tenure. You know you’re old when you wore vintage the first time around.

“It’s the Wi-Fi,” she said. “Ever since we got it, the place has been packed.” “Mmmm,” I nodded. “The Wi-Fi.”

I’d been trying to forget that the adorable sandwich-and-smoothie shop had Wi-Fi. A wireless connection was a veritable Pandora’s box of procrastination, and I came there to work without distractions. The minute I logged on to the Internet, I knew I’d be a goner. Instead of typing scripts or editing tape, I’d be shopping on Amazon and bidding on eBay, not to mention writing personal e-mail, which, thanks to the twin efforts of composing and typing, feels like actual work and is therefore the world’s best, and most dangerous, method of procrastination.

The counter girl left, and I scanned the rest of the shop. Each of the eight tables along the wall had an open laptop and face-up cell phone on it, in addition to the shop’s coffee mug. People were staring into their screens with focused expressions. The woman next to me with two gold nose rings appeared to be editing wedding photographs; the disheveled guy next to her had a few windows open and a pencil tucked behind his ear. So uniform were we, lined up against the mirrored back wall in our semi-showered, hooded sweatshirt, tech- and java-ness, we could have been poised to begin a musical number called “We Bring Our Computers To Coffee Shops”.

It made me wonder: Was the adorable sandwich and smoothie shop turning into Starbucks?

Before I could muse on this any further, the Celebrity walked in. The star of an HBO series, she had moved to the neighborhood during the show’s hiatus so she could wait out her pregnancy in the tabloid obscurity of an outer borough.

I’d discovered this when, after a months-long dance of half smiles and hellos here in the adorable sandwich-and-smoothie shop, the Celebrity and I had finally broken the ice by revealing our still under-wraps pregnancies to each other, which I guessed officially made us friends.

Any doubts I had about the status of our relationship were put to rest when, immediately upon entering the shop, she spotted me and made a beeline for my table.

“How are you, Eve?” she said, rushing over and air-kissing both of my cheeks. “Have you gone public with the pregnancy yet?” she asked, sitting down in the empty chair at my table.

“I’ve gone public,” I said, wondering if I should care about the presumptiveness of her interruption. I didn’t mind her sitting down, but shouldn’t she have asked first? Wasn’t an open laptop the universal coffee shop sign of getting work done?

“Me too,” she said. “Not that I’d have much choice any more with this belly,” she said, opening her parka to reveal the first signs of a bump forming above the lowered waistline of her yoga pants.

“Wow,” I said, and I meant it. Would two weeks – that’s how much further along she was – find me with such a protrusion?

“I know,” she said, as if reading my thoughts. “Just a few days ago, I looked down and I’d popped.”

I smiled, thinking that must feel exciting. Despite having made the announcement, my own pregnancy didn’t quite feel real. The morning sickness had, thankfully, subsided, but it left in its wake a great yawn of nothingness. Without the two sets of sonogram pictures now posted with magnets on the refrigerator door, I might have believed I’d made the whole thing up.

“Hey,” the Celebrity said, acknowledging my laptop at last with a point of her chin. “Don’t tell me you’re logged on to citybaby?”

Citybaby was a Web site the celebrity had told me about. She’d told me the “expecting” message board was a great place to obsess about your pregnancy when you weren’t telling anyone you were pregnant.

She hadn’t told me it was totally addictive. With posts ranging from the neurotic – “23 wks, gained 27 lbs. Is this normal?” – to the mundane – “name poll: Ella or Claire?” to the downright confessional – “dh” (that meant husband) “thinks pregnancy an accident, but I secretly stopped taking pill. Should I tell? I’m 30 wks along…” the message board was a living, breathing window into city-dwelling pregnancy, a collective subconscious of pregnant New York.

Even now, when I could have real conversations with flesh-and-blood people about my pregnancy, I was still totally hooked. I’d been telling myself this was okay, that, since I only read and never posted, my citybaby habit was under control. But the term for this on the board was “lurking,” and I worried I was somehow being virtually unfriendly.

But in the past few weeks, citybaby had surpassed personal e-mailing as my procrastination method of choice. Getting away from it was now a big reason I came here. “No, I’m not on citybaby now,” I told the Celebrity. Thinking she wouldn’t understand, I didn’t bother explaining about the wireless Pandora’s box.

“Well, have you been on there at all today yet?” She asked, her eyes bright with mischief.

“No….” I said, slowly shaking my head. “Oh my God! You have to get on, Eve!” she said. “There’s a woman on there whose husband may or may not be fooling around with a co-worker. He was out all night the night of his office Christmas party, which she left early because she’s two weeks from her due date. He claims to have passed out at a male co-worker’s place, but no one on the board is buying it.” She gestured with her chin again. “I’ll go order my lunch, while you read and catch up.”

I thought for a moment about saying no, and explaining my need for a separate, Internet-less place where I could concentrate and get work done.

But I was too weak, and this post was too juicy.

“All right,” I said, logging on.

The Brooklyn Chronicles appears each Friday. Previous installments are available at www.nysun.com/archive_chronicles.php. The author can be reached at kschwartz@nysun.com.