Beep-Beep---Beep!!! Right in the middle of the sermon. You could tell whose pager it was by the way his shoulders tensed up. Embarrassing, right? Well, maybe. But from where I sat the fellow looked more like he was worried about missing a message than embarrassed about disrupting the church service.
In Woody Allen's movie, "Play It Again Sam," there's a character named Dick Christie. There's a scene in the movie where Dick is checking in to tell the office his location.
"Ill be at 362-9296 for a while. Then I'll be at 648-0024 for about fifteen minutes. Then I'll be at 752-0420."
About that time, his wife pipes up, "There's a phone booth on the corner. You want me to run downstairs and get the number? You'll be passing it."
Dick was sure that staying connected was the key to success. And that he was almost there. He just had to work a little harder.
The problem was that he saw being connected as the goal and lost sight of purpose and relationships. He remembered hundreds of phone numbers, but he forgot his wife's birthday. Sound familiar?
Today's Dick Christie would certainly have a cell phone, probably one that can get messages off the Internet. He'd have a laptop and probably a Palm Pilot. He'd have a pager for sure. It would be a digital one with messaging capability. It would probably go off in church.
Having the gear isn't the bad thing. Those connectivity tools let you work just about anywhere. They help you be more productive. They keep you in touch.
What is a bad thing is if you let the gear become the whole show. It's supposed to work for you, not the other way around. You bought it. It didn't buy you.
Here are a few questions to help you figure out if you're riding the technological horse or whether that horse is dragging you behind it.
When you go on vacation, how often do you check your business email and voicemail?
The original idea was that being in touch while out of the office would give us freedom and flexibility, as well as help us be more responsive to our customers, family and friends. But an Andersen Consulting study found that about 80 percent of folks who went on vacation, stayed in touch with the office.
I remember last summer when I was on the phone with the CEO of one of my client companies. We were talking about a project when I heard a voice in the background. "Daddy ... Daddy ... Daddy!!!!"
It was his son. He was on "vacation" with his family at the beach. He covered the mouthpiece, but I could hear him tell his son, "I'll watch you when I'm done working."
I found myself thinking about the old Harry Chapin song where the father is always too busy to do things with the son until he's retired. Then he wants his son to spend time with him, but the boy, now grown is too busy. "He'd grown up just like me ... " laments the father.
The point is that being too busy for you family is nothing new, but technology lets us take it to a whole new level. My client could fool himself. When he told me he was on vacation, he meant it. But he wasn't. Instead, he was working at the beach with his son nearby.
What about you? It's hard in today's world to make time for our families and other human relationships with all the business pressure and pace, but are you allowing your technology to make your choices for you?
And here's another question. How many times have you felt tethered to the office recently? It's hard to feel like you're in control of your life when the boss, or your clients can call you any time, no matter what you're doing.
I've had a cell phone for years and I couldn't live and run my business the way I want without it, but only The Most Beautiful Woman in the World has the number. She uses it to reach me when I'm in town and she needs to get a message to me - like telling me she's meeting a friend for dinner. Everybody else calls my regular number.
Then my voicemail system sends off a signal to my pager that there's a message waiting. I may use the cell phone to return the call, but I don't want to be interrupted all the time.
How many times are you on the cell phone in a situation where you used to be relating to the people around you?
There are lots of places where we used to relax a bit and chat with folks, we now devote time to checking messages and returning calls. I caught myself doing that in the barber shop recently. I wonder how many times in how many similar situations I didn't catch myself.
I've seen friends of mine arrive home talking on the cell phone. They walk through the house talking on the phone and ignoring the folks around them. Is that you?
It's one thing to be connected, but again, we often fool ourselves. We think it doesn't matter to the folks around us, that we're really there for them while we're on the phone or the computer. But we're not. And they know it, even if we don't.
The fact is that we're letting technology rule us and run us and interfere with the human part of our lives. Sometimes we have little choice in this. There are employers-AOL is one-who require their staff to check business email on the weekend.
But if it's our choice we give ourselves lots of reasons why it's OK. That's because nobody wakes up in the morning and says, "Gosh, I think I'll let my life be interrupted dozens of times today by any bozo who has my cell phone number." No, we find a good reason to let the technology horse drag us along.
Maybe, like Dick Christie, we figure we need to stay connected to keep up with the competition or to make more money. That can be a real driver if you're on the promotional fast track, or if your household is just a couple of paychecks away from insolvency or if you don't think you make enough.
The median income for American households is around $45 to 50 thousand. But a Roper Starch poll tells us that Americans think they have to make $63,000 to be comfortable.
This reminds me of the little boy in D. H. Lawrence's story, The Rocking Horse Winner. Lawrence tell us that his home is haunted by the unspoken phrase, "There must be more money." So, little Paul rides his rocking horse maniacally until he "gets there" - until he finds a way for the house to get more money. In the story it's by suddenly knowing what horses to bet on.
His mother and uncle encourage him to ride. The uncle says, "Don't stop till you get there, boy."
So he rides and rides with the voice in his head, "There must be more money. There must be more money."
In the end, the family gets more money, and little Paul dies.
We often ride our techno-rocking horses too hard. But we have the power to climb off them.
We can shut of the cell phone for a while. Try that, especially on what's supposed to be a day off.
We can let the email go unchecked for a while. In a slower, more leisurely age, it was said of Napoleon that he never opened mail until it had been around for at least two weeks. The logic was sound. If it's urgent, someone will run up and tell you about it. And if it's not, two weeks won't matter. It's amazing how many things resolve themselves, if we allow them the time.
Take the untethered time you gain to rediscover our humanity. Take a walk. Go alone and marvel at the things you've missed that are nearby. Or go with someone you care about. Discover the wonder together and share.
A couple of weeks ago, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World took time to read the paper one morning. It's something she likes to do, but schedules and demands and all and got in the way for a couple of months.
"It was really wonderful," she told me that night, "to just read the paper and drink some coffee and do something for me." Yes, it was. And we all need more of that.
This feature appeared on 25 September 2000.
