I opened the door just as the young man was about to set foot on the walkway leading to my front steps. He looked up and smiled and raised his right hand, pulled into a gentle fist, and said, “Knock, knock.” He was going door to door on behalf of a big, big company famous for terrible service to let everyone know about a new special combining an Internet connection, the cell phone and the direct TV. “You guys aren’t interested in any of that?” he asked when I said no thanks. (I love the “you guys” bit, which is used by almost everyone who comes to the door). “We want less of all three of those things,” I said, “not more.” He looked shocked, but only for a moment. Soon enough he glanced at the home security sign in my yard – which is fake, of course, which I probably shouldn’t write, but oh well – and said, “You know, you can connect and manage everything. You can even turn your alarm off and on with your cell phone … no matter where you guys are.”
One of the things I started noticing earlier this summer is the proliferation of seriously sloppy e-mail that goes around. There is nothing new about this, of course, but it does seem to be getting worse. In June, for some reason, the stars aligned for me and I found myself in constant communication not with one or two or three but four people – clients, of course – who are relentlessly, outrageously, unapologetically sloppy in e-mail. Directions are vague and unclear and usually wrong. Documents that are attached to messages “for context” more often than not turn out to be – oops! – the wrong document. According to the rules of what I fear is the new normal, the sloppsters answer questions by simply forwarding a mail from someone else equally sloppy. It is because of this experience of working with four of them at once that I now have a new rule for responding to work-related e-mail: No response from me for at least an hour, because I really do not trust myself to not begin an e-mail sent moments after receiving one with, “Hey, dumb fuck, read my message, which I intentionally wrote at the third-grade level, and then, if you must, borrow a brain from someone before sending another single speck of nonsense, because my patience for your idiocy is gone.” You can’t say stuff like that when they’re paying you, I’ve learned. So I wait an hour.
One thing I did notice, though, is that a great many of the worst e-mails have a little tag line at the bottom: Sent from my Blackberry. Or: Sent from my iPhone. As a person who thinks cell phones should have the living hell regulated out of them and their usage, it won’t surprise anyone that I find this sort of half-assed behavior appalling. And that fits into place perfectly with another thing I’ve noticed over the past few years, which is that the city seems full of people reduced to a zombie state as they screw around with their walky-talkies while they’re in line for coffee, at the grocery store, waiting to board a flight, riding the bus, riding an elevator. People are doing a lot while they're on the go, including, I presume, answering work-related e-mails. They're able to do more than ever before, so we're told, and as far as I can tell they're doing none of it well.
There’s another computer issue I’ve noticed lately. I recently bought a bike and I’ve been riding around here and there quite a bit. And I’ve noticed that it is not at all uncommon to see someone else on a bike fucking around with his or her cell phone while riding. Texting? Checking e-mail? Believing, as many people in Portland still do, that it’s hip and edgy to use a cell phone in public? I have no idea, but here are a few observations. In addition to being incredibly stupid from a personal safety standpoint, and in addition to being what I consider sacrilege, it forces me to ponder a very specific scenario: If a person riding a bike and using the cell phone at the same time were to be hit and eternally confined to a wheelchair by the careless driver of an SUV, toward whom would my sympathies align? As much as I loathe and detest SUVs and those who drive them, the answer to what was once a very simple question is not clear to me.
