"All the World's an Office"

[Carl Remick]

[This article, from today's NY Times, ties in with a reference I made a 
couple of days ago here to a Wall Street Journal piece, "When Work Is 
Frantic."  What saps people are!  I can remember years ago when fax machines 
first arrived at the workplace and office go-getters were keen on having one 
installed in their home.  Even then I could see that this was a 
camel's-nose-under-the-tent development that would simply create another way 
for my corporate overlords to barge into my personal life with more work 
demands.  To me the big difference between today and earlier ages is that so 
many people today buy into this nonsensical notion that they are "players" 
in the corporate world and have no notion that they are fungible nonentities 
who are being exploited – in that disgusting, ominous new buzzword – "24x7." 
  (BTW, this is a new-generation Remick e-mail, purged of those curly "smart 
quotes" I understand were causing some of you folks formatting problems.)]

For the Well Connected, All the World's an Office

Cell Phones, Pagers and Wireless E-Mail Have Created a Workday That Never 
Ends

By Katie Hafner

Woody Allen got it right nearly 30 years ago. In "Play It Again, Sam," the 
most memorable character is Dick Christie, a workaholic who cannot let a 
minute pass without phoning the office to report his location.

"I'll be at 362-9296 for a while," Dick calls in to a colleague. "Then I'll 
be at 648-0024 for about 15 minutes. Then I'll be at 752-0420." Upon 
overhearing the conversation, his exasperated wife quips, "There's a phone 
booth on the corner. You want me to run downstairs and get the number? 
You'll be passing it."

If Dick Christie lived and worked in 2000, he would undoubtedly own a pager 
that sends and receives e-mail, a personal digital assistant, a cell phone 
with Web access, and perhaps even an electronic assistant able to pass phone 
calls and e-mail to him wherever he is. Then again, they might own him.

To be sure, wireless devices are instruments of liberation. They lend an 
unprecedented degree of flexibility to the workday. At the same time, 
whatever line people have drawn between work and leisure, between office and 
home, is growing thinner than ever as a sense of obligation to stay 
connected to work at all hours continues to grow.

Both Ford Motor Company and Delta Airlines recently announced plans to give 
their employees personal computers and Internet connections at highly 
subsidized prices. Many companies, like Cisco Systems, already give 
employees home Internet connections. Some workers are given high-speed 
service. Others are likely to follow suit.

But social scientists and business experts are beginning to revisit some 
familiar questions: What is the cost to an employee's psychological well 
being if that employee is constantly within reach? Will a connection from 
home -- one provided by an employer -- increase the pressure to check in 
with work during off hours? When is one's own time truly one's own?

Throw wireless devices into the mix, and those questions become all the more 
pressing. Pagers and cell phones and laptop computers with wireless modems 
are often now packed along with the rest of the vacation gear. Cell phones 
are a common fixture on tables at restaurants, whether the meal is for 
business or not.

"People think wireless devices enhance their control over their lives," said 
Arlie Russell Hochschild, a professor of sociology at the University of 
California at Berkeley and the author of "The Time Bind: When Work Becomes 
Home and Home Becomes Work," recently out in paperback (Owl Books). "I don't 
think it's clear that that's true. In fact, what you could argue is that 
you're losing control because it means you're responding to other people's 
calls."

Professor Hochschild said she had observed that in places where strangers 
used to interact with one another -- the hairdresser's, cabs, the grocery 
store -- people are now busy having cell phone conversations.

Peter Huemer is a latter-day Dick Christie. Mr. Huemer, 32, is the 
proprietor of User-Friendly Computing, a small, successful computer service 
and installation company in Santa Cruz, Calif.

It is the nature of Mr. Huemer's job to have to stay in touch, but even he 
would admit that in the name of serving his customers, he has taken things 
to extremes. Not only does Mr. Huemer own both a cell phone and a pager, but 
they are at his side every minute of every day. He also checks his e-mail 
compulsively.

Mr. Huemer knows that he no longer has a life outside work. While he and his 
wife, Valerie, a 30-year-old accountant, were in church recently, his pager 
sounded twice during the sermon. "It was kind of a large congregation so I 
was hoping no one knew it was me," Mr. Huemer said.

Dinners in restaurants, Ms. Huemer said, are often marred by incoming cell 
phone calls. That leaves her to pick at her food while her husband spends 
half an hour coaching someone through a computer problem.

Mr. Huemer is not unsympathetic to his wife's concerns. "She's unhappy about 
what she sees as a constant intrusion," he said. "I walk in the house and 
instead of saying hello, I have a phone on my ear."

So blurred has the line between work and home become that the Huemers are in 
marriage counseling. Mr. Huemer takes both cell phone and pager to the 
sessions. When they go off, the therapist insists that Mr. Huemer place both 
devices outside, where they stay for the remainder of the hour, beeping and 
ringing piteously on the other side of the door.

The dilemma people face is perhaps best summed up, albeit unwittingly, by an 
advertising campaign by the cellular carrier Sprint PCS for what it calls 
the Clear Wireless Workplace: cell phones that not only can gain access to 
the Web and send and receive e-mail but can give employees access to their 
companies' internal networks, including inventory and sales information. One 
of the campaign's slogans is "Your employees don't have to be in the office 
to stay productive."

While telecommuting has brought a new level of flexibility to the workday, 
hyperconnectedness does not necessarily mean that people are going into the 
office less. More often than not, it means that when they leave the office, 
they keep at least part of their minds focused on work.

Howard A. Tullman, chairman of The Cobalt Group, an Internet marketing 
company and e-commerce service for auto dealers, said in most of the 
companies he had run over the years, employees were required to check voice 
mail and e-mail seven days a week. America Online occasionally announces 
e-mail-free weekends, usually around a holiday, when employees are not 
expected to check e-mail. On all other weekends, of course, they are 
expected to check their e-mail.

For many people, that's just fine. John Volkmann, president of the Brand 
Momentum Group, a consulting company in Austin, Tex., and Palo Alto, Calif., 
was interviewed for this story as he sat in a daylong workshop in Denver and 
answered questions sent directly to and from his Motorola Skytel pager via 
e-mail.

When asked if he felt that he had to be accessible at all hours, if he ever 
felt as though he had no time to himself, Mr. Volkmann tapped out this 
response: "I've found that this connectivity allows more blending of what 
used to be fixed-time periods, e.g., working on a weekend so you can play 
golf on a weekday."

But it is precisely that blending that has some experts concerned. "Blending 
is a bland term that disguises what is really a new mind-body problem," 
Professor Hochschild said. "For some people, like your neighbors and 
sometimes your children, your body is there but your mind is not. And for 
others, like your workmates, your mind is there but your body is not. 
Sometimes it's nice to have both your mind and your body present."

"There is a paradox in wireless technology," said Pekka Himanen, a 
researcher and lecturer who studies the philosophy of technology at the 
University of Helsinki in Finland, a country besotted with cell phones. 
Originally, Professor Himanen said, mobile computing devices were based on 
the need for doing things on the move, when working by any other means was 
impractical. Now, he said, they supplement one's regular workday at the 
office, extending the time spent working.

"On the one hand, it frees people to do things whenever and wherever they 
like, and this is great," he said. "But on the other hand, the end result 
can easily be that life starts to move faster and faster, and it becomes a 
kind of extreme sport where you take more and more out of yourself."

Time zones pose another challenge. Carolyn Layne, a vice president at 
Informix, a database software company based in Menlo Park, Calif., travels 
frequently, and a recent trip to Brazil made her modern predicament 
painfully clear. "I had meetings from 7 a.m. to midnight," she said, "then 
from midnight to 3 a.m., I would check e-mail and voice mail."

Ms. Layne, who was interviewed by cell phone for this article while she was 
in a car on her way to a long weekend of skiing at Lake Tahoe, Calif., said 
she often made an effort to reserve downtime, not only for herself but also 
for her employees. She said she had recently noticed that an employee who 
reports to her, Pamela Vitale, was having particular trouble disconnecting 
from work. "I looked at her and said, 'This woman is killing herself,' " Ms. 
Layne said. Ms. Vitale deals with people around the world for a unit of 
Informix.

So one Friday morning, she called Ms. Vitale into her office. "I said, 'I'm 
going to keep your cell phone and computer in my office for the weekend, and 
I want you to go home right now and plant flowers.' " Ms. Layne told Ms. 
Vitale she wanted to watch her leave an auto-reply message on her e-mail, 
and a similar outgoing voice-mail message, to say she would not be checking 
messages until Monday.

Then, with Ms. Vitale still seated in her office, Ms. Layne called Ms. 
Vitale's husband to tell him to monitor his wife and to make sure that she 
did not try to use the telephone or his computer. She followed up with a 
phone call over the weekend to make sure that Ms. Vitale was complying. (She 
was.)

Ms. Vitale said she had emerged from her communications-free period with a 
new perspective. "It was like a splash of cold water," she said. "Quite 
honestly, and I mean it truthfully, I didn't see I was starting to slip into 
a black hole. Being without these things for several days caused me to stop 
and reflect and say, Wait a minute, I need to reinstate some balance in my 
life."

For her part, Ms. Layne said she often wondered what people used to do 
before their lives were consumed with communicating with work.

She was reminded of the answer one morning recently when she found herself 
with enough time to sit down and read the newspaper. "It's the first time 
I'd been able to do that in a month or two," she said. "It felt like taking 
a bubble bath. It felt nice, just to have some silence."

Bubble baths, both real and metaphorical, experts say, are crucial for an 
employee's psychological well being and, ultimately, for that person's 
productivity.

"This really may have a secret backfire for employers," Professor Hochschild 
said. "What they're getting are more frazzled, less priority-driven workers 
who are always interrupted. They're soaking in a culture of interruption. 
That's the bubble bath they're really in."

John Hagel, who leads the e-commerce practice in Palo Alto at McKinsey & 
Company, a consulting company, agreed. "Everyone has gone into more and more 
of a reactive mode," he said, "making it hard to focus on what direction 
they're heading and losing sight of what's important. Connectivity is great, 
but not if you don't have time to synthesize the information."

Mr. Huemer said he was acutely aware of the activities that have disappeared 
from his life. In the years before his preoccupation with being available 24 
hours a day, he said, he was an avid reader, and he jogged and bicycled 
regularly. He went to movies and maintained a healthy diet.

But he was recently turned down for life insurance when his cholesterol 
level registered dangerously high. Even his sleeping hours have been 
consumed by work. "Bad dreams aren't about some awkward social moment or 
being chased by something," he said. "They're about being on some endless 
computer problem, where one thing goes wrong and then another."

There are signs that people are starting to draw the line, that a small 
insurrection may be in the making. Kevin Wassong, a New York advertising 
executive, recently went into a Sprint PCS store in Manhattan to check on 
the Wireless Web phone.

"I looked at the sales guy and I said, 'Do I really want to be that 
connected?' " Mr. Wassong recalled. "We looked at each other and together, 
we said, 'No.' " Mr. Wassong did not buy the phone.

[end]

Carl





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