Oddball Update

I figure, at some point, life in America is going to reach critical mass.

What I mean is, eventually we’re all going to simply stop actually accomplishing anything, because all of our time will be spent chasing around and catching up. As technologies emerge that allow us to contact people instantly from anywhere, keep tabs on each other with tracking devices and have all of our work with us anywhere we go, the irony is that — as I see it — we’re going to actually get less done. After all, how much have you been known to accomplish when your phone was constantly ringing? When your email box was constantly full? When there was always something else someone needed from you that they couldn’t wait to tell you about?

Over the last month or so, as I’ve (unfortunately) elected to do more work than I should have, I’ve artificially moved myself much closer to that precipice of which I speak. With four different email accounts being checked automatically every ten minutes, two phones and and instant messaging service that are always on, I’ve literally been under a blanket of constant communication. There have been a number of days, in fact, where I spent literally the first three hours of my day just responding to email. By the time I’d finish one litany of written word, another message would arrive, demanding similar attention. And so I’d attack it with the same voracity, writing and re-writing, analyzing and refining my words as I always do, in an endless cycle of perfectionistic emendation.

And at the end of the day, when I finally put away my work at ten or eleven o’clock, I felt frustrated and had trouble sleeping — because I felt like I hadn’t gotten anything done. Despite how many precious minutes this communication soaks up, it feels like it’s all gone to waste, because you have no tangible result to show for your time spent. Indeed; when writing emails, I’m usually responding to a horde of questions clients are asking me. The vaugeness of some of these questions, coupled with my need to be as efficient and precise as possible, leads me to answers that sometimes generate still more questions — at least in my own mind. For example:

Okay, I know they want me to make this certain feature work. But I’m not exactly sure how to do that. So before I agree, I’d better research what it will take. Oh man, it looks complicated. I might have to utilize this third-party component here, but that breaks this other feature that we’re currently relying on. Which feature is more important? Furthermore, is there another way to accomplish this? How many hours would it take? How much time will I need to invest before I know whether it will work or not?

I drive myself crazy with these thoughts most nights, lying in bed for as much as two hours every night before I finally, somehow, get my brain to wind itself down enough to fall asleep. And in the morning it starts all over again. One day, perhaps, you could separate the American workforce into two types of people: Those who do nothing but communicate eight different ways 24/7, and those who sit in a sensory deprivation tank, immune to outside contact, and just get things done. (When that happens, allow me to be the first to say, “Tank me.”)

Now, take all of this hyper-communication, and throw a monkey wrench into the works. The ever-more-complex devices that we rely on to deliver this instant gratification, day in and day out, are not always working 100%. I have spent years and years becoming as familiar with technology as possible so that I would always know how to build a fast, efficient, and most importantly reliable base of equipment for my daily use. To the point, in fact, where now my bosses turn to me for advice on computer hardware, rather than the MIS guy they hired to work with it on a daily basis. But even my setup is not immune to failure.

Take today, for example. As if I didn’t already have enough work to do, our Comcast cable Internet service went out. Actually, so did our Comcast cable TV. For seven hours. Those seven hours would have been entirely missed had they happened overnight, but no — this downtime was between 1:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. Pretty much my entire work day, in other words.

After the first few hours, when it became clear that a quick fix from the cable company was not forthcoming, I went up to my parents’ house to see if they had service there. Of course, both cable TV and Internet was working fine at their house. I had my laptop, so I checked my email and found a message from a client who was trying to get a hold of me by phone. I called him on my cell, but his phone was off. Okay, great. I don’t want to leave a voicemail with my cell phone number, because I’ll never be able to un-ring that bell — I’ll have clients calling me on my personal line, and I’ll be paying for it. Screw that. But what else to do?

So I went home, got my VOIP office phone and its accompanying rat’s nest of cables, went back to my parents’ house, hooked it up and forwarded it to my cell. Then, of course, I called the client to leave a voicemail — and he picked up right away. Gooooo figure. At least I got his issues squared away. Sure, he brought up a bunch of new issues that I then had to go solve, but that’s neither here nor there.

By tonight, our Internet service had been restored (so I schlepped back to my parents’ house and retrieved all of my phone junk). The subsequent cascade of emails that flowed into my inbox just served as a reminder that despite my lack of connectivity, the rest of the world was rocketing along at warp nine, and expecting me to be hanging right there with them. God forbid I should have a technical issue that’s beyond my control, or have a car accident, or get sick and die or anything. (Excuse me while I knock on wood a few times.)

And as dutiful working-class Americans, when we have our faith shaken in our great technological safety net, how do we react? By thinking of more technology we could slather onto our lives like a fat layer of peanut butter, that would purportedly help us avoid such issues in the future. Today’s Internet outage, for example, had me wondering if Comcast business class service — nearly twice as expensive at $100 a month — would have been more reliable (quick answer: I doubt it). Or last week, when I was out helping my boss move all day, and came back home to find a couple of somewhat impatient emails, I wondered if I could afford to enroll in a cellular data communication package so I could read my email on my phone (quick answer: I doubt that, too).

And as technology gets cheaper, it also has a way of getting less reliable, in case you hadn’t noticed. The march of progress is now so swift, that total product evolution can occur in just months, rather than years. Today I wondered if storing all of my work files on an external hard drive would make things easier in case I needed to work outside my home; I’d just unplug my hard drive and bring it along. But damned if I could find a single external hard drive that, based on the reviews, I wasn’t convinced would die on me within a year. The discount-enabling disposable construction of most of today’s equipment, coupled with the expectation that consumers will replace their gadgets ever more rapidly to stay in step with technology, has left us with a bunch of time-bomb hardware that we must both expect to fail at any moment, and yet rely on for mission-critical applications.

When we think of adding more hardware to our lives for the sake of so-called efficiency and redundancy, do we have these thoughts so that we can work even more swiftly, be even more reachable and even more “in the game?” Or is it really the game coming back to get the last laugh on us — by making our lives even more complicated and our routines even more prone to failure? We pull the Great Chain, as Andrew Ryan would say, and it’s mockingly pulling right back.

On a day like today, when the infrastructure of my life fell apart for seven hours and my routine was turned upon its ear, I became acutely aware of something — and that is, just how enjoyable a simple hour can be, when it’s spent having dinner and enjoying a passive, blessedly non-interactive DVD. Or, any other quiet activity spent alone or with your loved ones. It was the realization that no matter how unconscionably ridiculous modern American life becomes, those simple “offline” pleasures have a way of rejuvenating the soul in ways that we mustn’t forget.

Because if we eventually squeeze every last, precious second from our lives, and devote every waking moment to constant contact, 100% uptime and working at the speed of light, we’ll become a useless society of automatons that no longer remembers how to truly create…just grist for the world’s mill.

Categorized as Life, Randomness