(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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