I do most of my trolling in the sites that are online editions of national business magazines, and man, the shit people write about, and the shit people get paid to write about. (You could say the same of me, and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but at least I have the humility – or so I tell myself – to seek out projects that are “authored” by someone else, “authoring” and “writing” being, for those of you who are unaware, two very different designations).
Recently I ended up in a blog post written by some social media pioneer who, according to his bio, is a total rock star when it comes to infusing global brands with a personal, local level of experience. How could I not read what he had to say?
Before I go on I have to digress. I recently realized something after watching Dancing with the Stars: If I like the dance being performed, I automatically believe that the dancers performing it are dancing well. If I don’t like the dance being performed, if I am unable to notice any obvious missteps, I just go ahead and imagine a few.
So I’ve been trying to keep that in mind before I read something, and it’s a bit jarring. Another blog I recently read chastised – beautifully, for the most part – people who will not shut up about how busy and stressed out they are. The only problem was that the writing was terrible. On the other hand, our social media rock star, I hate to admit, writes quite well.
But his story – his “content” – is objectionable, I think: Coffee shops that don’t bend over backwards for the laptop militia deserve to go out of business. His blog was inspired by a barista who, when the author had problems getting a wireless connection, did not respond with sufficient “urgency.” (Urgency, by the way, is a big thing with the PR people – particularly those who are passionate about social media – and in addition to the fact that in more than a decade in the field I have yet to experience anything, directly or indirectly, that constitutes “urgency,” I’m here to tell you that the more trivial the matter, the more frequently the word is used.) I resisted the urge to post a comment on his blog along the lines of “What’s the name and address and operating hours of the coffee shop in Portland that doesn’t bend over backwards for the laptoppers?” I’d go out of my way to patronize such a business. Because I am so tired of coffee shops where one of the main visual characteristics is an illuminated approximation of an apple. I miss the artwork of yesteryear, displays that were rotated in and out once a month or so.
But I started thinking about it, and I think I’m being self-centered. I go to coffee shops – to one in particular, which happens to be in my neighborhood – to get away from computers. My addiction to caffeine predates e-mail, texting, wireless connections, laptops, cell phones – all the little innovations that have come along that seem to me little more than increasingly fancy and increasingly tiny renditions of what was once called the ball and chain. I remember, vaguely, going to coffee shops to meet people, to hear music, to read. I remember going to coffee shops, in fact, simply for a good cup of coffee.
These days, I go down the street to get away from my office and my job, both of which I adamantly confine to one room in my house, one with a door that is shut when the work day ends. I have never taken my laptop with me, nor do I plan to. What’s odd to me is that I often leave the coffee shop carrying a tension that I didn’t have when I arrived. It’s a sea of laptops in there, presided over by blank, vaguely dead looking faces, made even more ghoulish by the glow from their screens. It’s quite territorial, I think, even up front at the group table, where unfriendly faces belonging to unfriendly people glare up at anyone who dares to take a seat, as if that table is a campground and the spots have been reserved and paid for.
There are power outlets along one of the walls, and it’s sort of fun to watch those who couldn’t snag a seat beside one get a bit twitchy as – I presume – their batteries wear down. They stare at the tables along the wall, anxiously, a bit desperately, trying to calculate if anyone is getting ready to leave and, if so, how quickly. It’s like watching an addict on the verge of withdrawal.
And then there are the cell phones. In an era gone by, as I understand it, protocol dictated that when you went into a saloon you placed your pistol on the table or the bar for all to see. Whether that was meant to be a concession or a threat I cannot say, but at the coffee shop in my neighborhood the tradition lives on: There is a cell phone of one sort or another sitting on nearly every table. Sometimes I make a point of glaring at people who are braying into their devices, usually about whether or not an e-mail message has been sent or received, or whether a program or application is working properly or not, or a painfully detailed accounting of who the cell phone caller has spoken to thus far, who hasn’t returned calls, who has left messages and what the messages said, what time the caller arrived at the coffee shop, what time the caller plans to leave, where the caller is planning to go next. My glaring, like everything that falls outside the wireless network, is completely and utterly irrelevant.
That’s where I ended up: I’m not even objectionable to the constantly connected crowd. I’m simply irrelevant. Although the urgency appears to have taken over almost every coffee shop in Portland like the sickness that I believe it is, I still like sitting in well-lit places with good coffee and reading books and magazines that are printed on real paper, and I really enjoy having the freedom to write a blog post of my own (at home) applauding anyone unfortunate enough to earn a living accommodating the graceless who has the balls to respond to the social media rock star’s urgency in the most appropriate manner possible, which is to ignore it.
