I love you, but please quit talking to me.
Please don’t take that personally. At the very least, please linger on this page long enough so my editor records a view of sufficient seconds so I can earn what passes for my keep.
But for the love of all that is holy, please don’t say anything, because I’m drowning; drowning, I tell you, in incoming messages.
For most of you, this is starting to sound like some old Baby Boomer rant about all that new-fangled technology, and I assure you: I may be old enough to be a Boomer, but within me beats the heart of a technologically-proficient Millennial.
In my day I performed the digital equivalent of hiking to school uphill both ways in a snowstorm by using a cell phone keypad to send text messages, 666-55? You may have seen the letters AOL chiseled into a hieroglyph somewhere in the British Museum; I was an early subscriber to its lesser-known cousin, Prodigy. I met my husband online (and I wish I was making this up, because holy Roddenberry it’s embarrassing) in a group writing interactive Star Trek fan fiction.
Even today, I am figuring out how to use ChatGPT (Did I write this column with it? Only my editor knows for sure!) and have mastered enterprise database applications. I have all the latest Google doo-dads and I let them track and listen to me with impunity, because one of these days I may have my very own Silver Alert and I’m hoping my gadgets will get me home, along with the self-driving car I can’t wait to own.
When our robot overlords take over I want them to know that I have always been a fan, unlike some of my peers who refuse to reply to their grandchildren’s text messages because it’s not as good as a phone call.
To quote one of my favorite memes: How do I spell the sound of my eyes rolling?
But even as I sit on this foundation of technological superiority, I have met my match..
Remember when you were back at work at an office with coworkers, and there was nowhere else you could be working, because how could anyone work anywhere other than at an office? And you’d be really slammed on a project and working hard as you could to meet a deadline and Hal from Accounting would stop by your desk to see if you wanted coffee and it would take what seemed like forever, and in computer terms really is forever (about 23 minutes, according to studies) to get back to your task, and then the CEO’s assistant would need a file and then you’d finally get back to work and then your boss would call you to see if you had a progress report on that terribly important project?
Remember how that felt? No? If your memory has already started to go, you can thank constant interruptions for trashing most of your attention span.
If for some crazy reason you miss asking yourself “Now what was I working on?” repeatedly throughout the day, you’re gonna love business enterprise chat applications like Slack and Teams.
Back in the day, if you were in the middle of a meeting, you were immune to interruptions. Hal could see that you were leading this week’s agile scrum stand-up (that’s a thing, but they let you sit down if you’re old enough to remember first-run Flintstones episodes) and he would know that he should leave your coffee (with creamer, because frappuccinos didn’t exist back in the Stone Age) on your desk.
These days, when you’re in that virtual meeting sharing a Powerpoint deck to people around the world and Hal sends a Google Chat message comparing one of your audience unfavorably to a horse’s ass, it is displayed for all to see.
And all those people stopping by your desk? Try 20 of them, having two or three very civilly-worded debates/discussions/arguments in your office door about whether they can use a JSON file and which tracking software to buy and what should we get for lunch?
And they want you to participate, all at the same time.
Add about a hundred emails a day and three texts from your husband wondering where his keys are and you’re having a party.
Under your desk, because that’s the only place Google can’t find you.
Elizabeth Evans is a local mother, wife, daughter, sister, former stay-at-home mom, former work-outside-the-home mom, former work-at-home mom and a human resources consultant.
