The day is about to begin. I wake up in terror believing the white male cat sleeping on my chest is the beginning of a life ending heart attack. I navigate the dark cold hallway, festooned with an assortment of night lights and wait in vain for my joints to revert to the plasticity of 40 years prior. I shuffle like an old janitor on graveyard toward the coffee machine brewing up a pot of brown courage. I fill my cup and take a slurp. Now I am ready to face the demon of my day---information.
A dumb one tone cord and a mellow azure screen answer to the touch of the on button and while the fan whirs I start humming.
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that sav’d ludites like me. I once was lost in analog but digital I see”
I imagine a squirrel trying to cross six lanes of rush hour traffic. Only for me it’s bandwidth on the information superhighway.
Okay, First study the traffic.
I check three different email accounts, trimming spam and junk like a butcher in a hog packing plant. I dump the “reply alls” and IWI’s (info without importance- the one phrasers like “ thanks” “see you soon” “hasta luego”, “god bless”
Having separated the spam lumps from the knowledge gravy, now I can prioritize. My tiny chipmunk eyes dart back and forth, looking for a crossing. But wait, a drop down box appears at the top of the screen opening like a heavy Venetian blind with a broken cord. “Loans 5.7% fixed” with a tiny woman dancing like a marionette to command of some pimple faced programmer.
“What’s our current interest rate? I ask myself” Maybe we should re-finance?”
“No, no don’t get distracted” I tell myself, “back to prioritizing”
So I return to the remaining list of messages.
Should I start with the latest or maybe I should group them by name of sender or by discussion thread? I decide to start with today’s. Wait I want to file that message in a folder but first I have to find the folder. Where is it? Hold on partner, you’re losing your concentration. Back to the prioritizing. Can’t respond until you prioritize. Just when I’m making progress, here comes an important update on the stock market. I dodge that one but it’s immediately replaced by a picture of a new Obama cabinet picks, then by a newsletter announcing a blockbuster sale on wines. I eliminate ‘em both start to regain my composure and I’m making progress, stepping out carefully from the shoulder of the highway, when all of a sudden I see it – like a rodent sees a big rig bearing down. The concentration buster, the email that would tempt even the earth to abandon its rotation around the sun. This is the “OS” message—short for “Oh, s….” The surprise reply, the crisis, the refusal, the deadline. It begins with: “I am sorry but”… or “We have a problem” or “Your appeal has been denied” “you have until 8am tomorrow!” I scurry back to the shoulder of the info highway craft a cogent, calm, legally nonbinding response and then prepare to dart back into the flow of email when I realize
“Wait, how about my work?”, “That’s right, that’s where those checks come from.” Forgot about my daily calendar, oh oh am I prepared for that meeting? I was supposed to read those 5 attachments; better take a look.”
I look at one of the attachments which quotes a recent editorial and remember my new years’ resolution from 1999—“read the front page of the NY Times and Wall Street Journal daily”. But that reminds me of sports, “Okay I’ll just check the scores for a second. Wait, there’s an interesting blog.”
“Um, a message from one of my son’s, maybe I should look at that?” “Wait, I promised myself I was going to review my portfolio this week” Should I locate that instead?” Info coming fast in both directions, I’m a bug eyed cartoon character about to get hilariously flattened by a garbage truck of data bytes.
Okay, let’s review my portfolio. Should I review prices or earnings? Should I compare trends over the last week or last five years? . Wow---jagged lines up and down, is that the Dow Jones average or am I getting a migraine.
Now I feel like a negligent father who wandered off on an information side path and abandoned my child. As I start to open my son’s message I remember that I have unfinished work at my job.
So, I abandon the Times, my son and the stock market and pull up the electronic medical record. Oh my god! Thirty five patient messages, 25 emergency refills, 80 lab results, 50 x-rays to review. Should I start with the labs? Okay. But the first lab I check is abnormal, so I retrieve the patient’s record, realize I have to open her digital x-ray image and as I start to read it I realize there is an emergency request in my refill box. But, wasn’t I comparing the x-rays? Wait, I didn’t finish my email…
I try to look back down my information trail but can’t retrace my steps, all the links look the same, the tabs are blurry, and I can’t find that first screen that I started at. I’m fading, getting sweaty, irritable, feeling lightheaded, lips and mouse hand going numb, right clicking spasmodically—a cyber panic attack is setting in.
Time for help.
I envison analog police joined by a cyber social worker.
-“Sir, “Take your hands off the keyboard, put them over your eyes and step away from the screen”
-“Just breathe, repeat your mantra ‘info no, let it go’. Now imagine yourself in the 14th century before the invention of the printing press, reciting myths” I regain my composure with some tough self talk, “You goin to feel guilty if you don’t answer every message, check every lab, and respond to every query? Can’t leave a little info clutter on the old desktop, can’t stand to see your in-basket bubbling with one million bytes, threatening to fry your CPU and your sense of control? Clean plate club, tidy room syndrome? Let it go…”
The smell of chocolate chip cookies blows in from the kitchen like a monsoon, sucking my cortex down to my gut. Hunger. Time to consume.
So I leave the room, pulling back off the shoulder of the highway. I enter the kitchen; savor a gooey chocolate moment and a milk moustache.
Visceral, not cerebral; bites instead of bytes. Starting to get a little sleepy, mind drifting…
Then suddenly a pre-set alarm goes off on my laptop calendar, I stand at attention, quickly wipe the fat and chocolate off my fingers and return to computer, a couple of cookie crumbs from my moustache littering the keyboard.
A Web Ex conference in progress, I’m late. Got to re-enter flow of traffic, can’t remember which of my twenty five passwords to use. First car, favorite pet, biggest regret? Back to the conference, Power Point presentations, Word documents, EXCEL spreadsheet flash across the screen, the conference is rolling along. Then up comes an instant message marked urgent and photos on the screen from the office party.
The desktop is full, no space to minimize, losing the Web conference, my heart’s racing, the laptop fan is in overdrive trying to cool the CPU, quick, quick, a giant semi of bites and bytes coming into my cache, entering my disc drive, quick close down some files, avoid…. Damn! Primitive black and white error messages fill the screen, I’m going down. Eject eject!--- the screen goes black.
It’s over. Splat!!
I’m road kill on the information superhighway.
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