I hate that word. The instant I hear it, my insides begin to ache.
Even in 1984, without the computers and the cell phones and Facebook and instant messaging and all the rest of it, the theater people had it down, and for that, in my own little way, I salute them. When they went to student council meetings to request funding, they needed to be at the top of the agenda because they were busy. For some reason, close to half the students in the first linguistics class I took were theater majors, who were adored by the professor, who was a nun who called herself “Deb” (whether that was her birth name or her nun name I couldn’t say – we were not close.) Getting the study groups scheduled could have been a nightmare had it not been for Deb’s understanding of the hardships of being a theater major. “Let’s remember to schedule around rehearsals for our thespian friends,” she said. “They’re quite busy this semester.” The theater majors bitched and moaned endlessly about the reviews published in the student newspaper. The reviews, they said, many times, were inaccurate. So, when I became the editor my senior year, I was pretty proud of myself for tackling that problem head on: Theater majors, provided they weren’t involved in the production being reviewed, would write the theater reviews. They knew the finer points of theater, after all, better than anyone else. A perfect solution, I thought, except for the one factor I hadn’t considered: They were too busy.
The people from the food co-op committee also have some skills when it comes to being busy. Although they’re not very slick people generally, they too are quite busy. A couple of them – who would make great PR people, come to think of it, were it not for a few appearance-related challenges – routinely say they’re too busy to do one thing or another, but then proceed to do it (because nobody else is capable, presumably) but do it incorrectly, or incompletely, or both. That’s followed by more mail, and more endless discussion at meetings. The worst person in that group, a woman who creates more inefficiency than anyone I’ve ever known, actually introduced herself at the first general meeting by telling an auditorium full of people that she was far too busy to get involved. But then, unfortunately, she did. Another sends e-mails so tedious they numb the soul. After a sentence or two (or three) about how “insane” things are at her office, she launches into paragraph after paragraph of pure pointlessness. Then she sets the mail to “High Importance,” and ends the mail – finally, mercifully – with some inane quip about honeybees, then her name and then “(at work).” She’s that busy!
PR, though, is different. The industry is based in large part on the art of taking something fairly standard – a computer, for example, or the ability to talk to someone on the telephone – and transforming it into a star-spangled spectacle so bright that it eclipses everything and anything that came before it. So I forgive myself for forgetting, for more than a decade, about the theater majors. The PR teams I worked with reinvented the concept of busy by taking it to an entirely new level, and I was so impressed I accidentally scrubbed my memory.
PR people – especially those who specialize in technology – are busy at all hours. E-mails are sent round the world at 3:00 in the morning. Facebook pages are updated shortly after midnight with ponderings about who is working on what. My personal favorite in that category: A rising PR superstar responded to someone’s status update in the dead of night with “can’t sleep … busy thinking about launch.” Isn’t that sad? PR people sit in meetings and talk about how busy they are. PR people are often too busy to go to lunch. PR people often begin their e-mail messages with a rambling comment or two about how busy they are, but hey, even though they’re busy they want to “touch base” or “circle back” with whomever they’re writing to, so they’re making time to “reach out” in e-mail. Whew!
Snow is such a fact of life in Alaska that there are many words to describe it; and in PR there are several ways to convey the fact that you’re busy. Sometimes you’re slammed. Sometimes you’re pulled in a thousand different directions, which can be abbreviated with “I’m really pulled today.” My all-time favorite, though, is this: heads down. My former manager once wrote me an e-mail that said, “I can’t meet with you today because I’m pretty heads down.” Like wine, that one just gets better (or worse) with time. Some would call this polishing a turd, or putting lipstick on a pig, but for me it’s a great example of word power: two words – heads down – become, without even breaking a sweat, three: dumb, dumber, dumbest.
But here’s where the PR people really distinguish themselves in the arena of busy. They power up their computers (hopefully earlier than anyone else) and then sign into their instant messenger program. Then they go into the control panel of their instant messenger system and change their status to, you guessed it, Busy. So when the rest of us start our workday and sign in to our instant messenger program, we are greeted with: Jane Smith is Busy. Although I’ve said this a thousand times, and even though it would be obvious to any reasonably alert first grader, here, once again, is my opinion: If you have time to screw around with an instant messenger status setting, you are, by definition, not busy.
