joeware - never stop exploring... :)

What do phones, beepers, and PDAs have in common?

Well now a days lots of things and in fact one of any of those will function as the others.

What I mean in particular is that people have enslaved themselves to those devices.

When someone’s phone or beeper or PDA goes off do you see how they scramble to respond? You would think the device had a whip or was electrically shocking the person. I don’t know if any device other than slot machines and drugs has ever enslaved otherwise intelligent people so completely.

Beepers I have no use for. I was a slave to a beeper/pager for most of the 8 years between 1996 and 2004. No choice, it was a job thing, if I wanted a job that paid what I felt a job should pay me, I had to submit to the pager.

Some people are like that for cell phones instead of pagers. That phone rings because someone somewhere feels that there is an issue that requires their attention. I am like that now for my work phone but only during business hours. Outside of that I don’t answer the phone, my home phone ringer is turned off, my cell phone is in a drawer when I am not working.

I am not one of those people who will have visitors over and when the phone rings I will drop my visitors like a cold lump of coal and run to the phone. I think that is rude. Of course if the ringer is on and people hear it ringing they EXPECT you to go get it which usually sparks a lively conversation about answering the phone. I will let the darn thing ring away, someone else’s priorities do not set mine.

In all of the years of answering phone calls, I have noticed a disturbing trend, as I get older and further up in the scale of the knowledge I have and more people are aware of me I receive far more calls. That alone is a pain because phone calls disrupt you, no matter what you are doing, they distract you from it, even if you were only sleeping or musing over absolutely nothing at all. If there was something else I wanted to be doing in that time, I would be doing it. Anyway, the phone rings, it distracts you, but for what? Again, from what I have seen, the ratio of the number of friends calling to say Hi or someone saying you have won a million dollars is going way down in relation to the number of people calling and wanting me to take on their task or solve their problem. It is almost as if they think, “Hey! You are good at solving problems, you probably want to solve mine for me too which would be particularly great because I want to go do something else.”

This was particularly the case in the last job I had. Everyone wanted me to solve their problems even if it had nothing to do with anything I normally did. Unfortunately, I was pulled into a few cases where I didn’t have a choice and I delivered. That just makes it more likely for someone to call you again. I had it pretty good though because I simply turned off the work phone. My supervisor was fine with that, in fact more than fine, he knew how much work I got done when I wasn’t disturbed which far outpaced someone who was constantly disturbed.

So in a work situation once people realize you won’t answer the phone, what do they do? Well the dumb ones will page you or submit a trouble ticket or send an email that simply says “Call me”. I love those, they are SO incredibly easy to ignore. The person has done NOTHING to entice me to even consider calling them. I have no problem deleting the email, the page, or closing the trouble ticket with the resolution of “Call me isn’t a problem I deal with, please supply proper details of the issue at hand and the troubleshooting steps thus far used to solve the problem.”. Someone once tried to get me in trouble for that, I quickly explained that we had three admins on the team, we supported several thousand lower level admins and in the end some 250,000 or so users (for some things it was millions or tens of millions of users really at stake). If we actually responded to everyone who wanted us to call them for just a 5 minute conversation, we would need 2 or 3 more people added to the team just to keep up with phone calls let alone getting real work done.

The worst part of phones other than the annoying ringing and phone spam? Conference calls. Conference calls tend to burn up more time for things that often don’t need conference calls. In many cases, the calls are done to get the feeling of “everyone cares and is worried about your problem”. If you are in a conference call and there are 2 or 3 people out of like 25 on the call doing all of the talking, it probably doesn’t make sense that there are 25 people on that call. In those cases unless I am the one stuck doing the talking I would much rather miss the call and get a nice set of clear concise notes about what happened on the call. I have had days where I race from on conference call to the next and the sad thing is that 90% of the same people are all on the same calls and I wonder, who is actually fixing the problems we are spending all of this time getting updates on?

PDAs… I just don’t do them. I don’t want to carry a computer with me everywhere. I have a hard enough time staying away from them. There are times that I would be interested in say a nice tablet PC for when I am in a position where it would be difficult to use a full laptop but no thanks to PDAs. If I don’t recall a phone number or address or grocery list or appointment, I figure there must be a reason, like I didn’t care enough to remember or something like that.

joe