Easy Access
I was at a fund raising corned beef and cabbage dinner a while ago with a couple of long time friends, both of whom were retired after long careers as big city cops. It was a delight to sit with them and watch the show as they proceeded to spend most of the evening, as they had for low these many years, busting each others’ chops at every opportunity. Having worked together and played together for decades they knew the tiniest minutia about each other and used this to poke fun and regale stories of what the other had done in a variety of embarrassing situations. I was delighted to be the observer as this played out and felt at times I should have had those numbered Olympic judges cards to give scores for who had the best jab.
At one point in the evening my one friend mistook the very hot horseradish he had heaped on his plate as some of the boiled potatoes. He jammed a hefty fork full of the white death into his unsuspecting mouth only to lose all of his breath and most of the contents in his nasal passages. Once the crisis had passed and we were certain that he was in fact not going to die, which had been questionable for several minutes, the banter was renewed with this incident now becoming part of the routine. As the beet red flush began to fade from his face into a more rosy red the other friend asked me to pass him some of that horseradish. I obliged but cautioned him “Be careful, this stuff will put lead in your pencil” to which my other friend, who had now at least partially recuperated, said “Yeah, but who’s he gonna write to?” I loved hanging out with these guys.
I tell that story because that line popped into my head as I reviewed all the different channels of access I now have to any number of people. I must be one of the most accessible human beings on the planet. I have eight separate e mail addresses, four land based telephone numbers with voice mail on each, a cell phone with voice mail, e mail and internet access, a fax machine and two US postal system mail box addresses. I have high speed internet access wirelessly networked throughout my home and office and a card I can plug into my computer that allows me to access e mail and internet sites remotely from wherever I happen to be. I have all this access to the world and the world has all this accessibility to me and I can only ask “Who ya gonna write to?”
I can remember not that long ago when I was given a pager by a company I worked for at the time. I spent much of my time outside of the office working with customers and driving from town to town. The rule was usually to call into the office twice a day, the first time was late morning and the second late afternoon, to pick up messages and see if anybody needed to talk to me. Like most folks who made their living on the road I knew all the best spots for pay phones and the most likely places to find an open pay phone in a new city. Just as a side note, McDonalds never had pay phones and your best bet was always a full service hotel. They had banks of pay phones, usually just off the lobby near the bar. Having used those phones for the afternoon call I’m guessing that placement was not random. From 3:00 PM on you could see the line of men huddled on each phone furiously scribbling notes and fumbling for change. It was like a big fraternity. And if you had to wait for an open phone, well the bar was right there. The real bonanza was when the phone company created the drive up phones positioned so you could sit in your car and make calls. You tried to keep the best locations of these little gems secret from the other fraternity members in hopes that they would not be discovered and would be available for you alone.
The pager they gave me was meant to make me immediately accessible should someone need to talk to me. I outwardly displayed great appreciation for the little device and as soon as I got to my car quickly removed the batteries and put it in the trunk. I, along with most of my compatriots, did not want to be immediately accessible. Before all these high-fangled modes of communication business was still conducted every day, things got done, people took responsibility and made decisions without a committee opinion. Customer questions were answered and messages were returned within a reasonable period. Then came the cell phone followed by e mail and it all changed.
It was all meant to make us more productive and in touch. But immediacy replaced responsibility. Additional accessibility led to additional people becoming involved. Things that could have been handled by one person now took on new dimensions as groups of people were copied on e mail requests and responses. People took less personal responsibility in favor of group think. Business changed from covering your territory to covering your ass. Voice mail has become the standard phone call screener and telephone answering systems have replaced the human if not cordial contact of the receptionist. We are without a doubt more accessible.
Depending on how your measure it, or define it, we are probably more productive in that we can hold telephone discussions and scribble notes while driving our cars off the road or into oncoming traffic or while sitting in some waiting room disturbing everyone around us who are usually on their cell phones. We can receive spam about enlarging our genitalia and reply to e mails from anywhere in the world, although those responses usually require us to get the information from somebody else. Then we can send text messages that will involve even more uninterested parties.
We do more for sure, but do we do it better than or even as well as we used to? I’m just not sure that we do. Is the abandonment of human contact and personal responsibility a reasonable price to pay considering all that we are now able to accomplish in a day? And how much do we really accomplish with this new technology versus just passing things around in a circle? It makes me wonder how we got anything done and grew our businesses in those good old days of pay phones and telexes. But we did. We did because we had the ability to prioritize and see to it that the most important things got done first. We knew the one person we could go to in the first place to get the answer our question, whether we liked the answer or not. We took responsibility to ensure that the customer was taken care of and didn’t need to include everyone in the free world in the process. We covered for each other and made sure a ringing phone got answered.
Yes, we are now accessible twenty four hours a day, seven day a week. But I still have to ask, who ya gonna write to?
