Life, Work & Wonder

Tag: books

  • 34 years later, email still uses most of my screen time

    WRITING PROMPT: What app uses most of your screen time, and do you feel bad about it?

    I was 24 — in 1992 — the first time I ever saw email.

    I was working as a teller at a local national bank branch, and one day they installed email on our branch’s shared computer. It was pretty mystical, really. Suddenly, you could go into a black dos based screen, type in someone’s email address, send them that email, and they’d receive it. We didn’t have to send a memo versus interoffice mail, or call the person on the phone, we could quickly type up something, hit send, know that they’d receive it instantly and when they could they could get back to us. It was pretty surreal, actually. Almost magical.

    Very few of us actually needed to send emails, but one day I thought it would be fun to email the CEO of our 50,000 employee company. So I searched and found his email address, then typed a polite email along the lines of, “Hi, I recently graduated college, I’m an employee at one of the bank’s branches, I really enjoy working here and I really love the email access we’ve been given.” I remember word spreading around my six colleagues and they gathered around and watched as I finished the email then hit “Send.” Whoosh.

    Maybe because my dad’s career was always fast tracked and at the time he was an executive at a Fortune 500 company, but I wasn’t intimidated at all by this endeavor. I was on employee at the company, he was in charge of the company, why wouldn’t he want to hear how much I appreciated working for the bank and the email he’d probably authorized? Still, people were amazed (or maybe stupefied) that I’d sent that off, and for the next few hours people would ask, “Did you get a response?”

    Then a response came in. He replied that he appreciated hearing from me, that he appreciated that I chose that bank as my first after-college job, and what were the long term ambitions for my career because maybe he could introduce me to that department? It was a minor celebration among all of us that I’d gotten an encouraging response.

    Except our Branch Manager From Hell didn’t see it that way. Not one bit. I was young at the time, so didn’t quite realize that there were some good bosses, a lot of less-than-stellar bosses, and a handful of spectacularly toxic bosses in this world. 34 years later, I can honestly say she was one of the latter. She was spectacularly bad on morale (for too many reasons to list here). And when word trickled through the branch that I’d received a response from the CEO, she marched up to the front of the branch and asked to speak with me. To make a long story short, she was irritated that I’d sent an email to the CEO. She felt like it reflected poorly on her branch because it showed that maybe we had too much time on our hands, that it was a misuse of company resources, that I’d gone around the chain of command (which wasn’t my intention), and that it was borderline insubordinate. I was instructed to delete the CEO’s email with no response, had a formal notice of unsatisfactory deposited in my HR Records, and was suspended from unsupervised computer usage for 30 days. This might seem like an extreme response, and it was; maybe her only justification was at the time email was still so new people were trying to figure it out and perhaps to her it was a little too much like witchcraft so reacted in kind?

    I learned something from that experience.

    I learned that most people are innately fearful of superiors who are many rungs up on the ladder, and that to be unafraid (confident) around them is actually a potential career booster. I learned that there are a million different unsuspecting ways to trigger a terrible leader. And that email was actually a pretty powerful and awesome real-time tool.

    Over the next 15 years I would use email extensively. To reach out to friends, negotiate contracts, and even to expand my network. I loved that email was instant, that I could put details in emails that most people will read, and just found it to be an amazing communication tool that was actually superior to phone call, meeting or (later) text.

    At a glance, I would say I use other applications more frequently than email. But if I drill down into it that’s not really true for me. I still spend an hour each morning scrolling through my email, reading through the day’s news (including great newsletters by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Morning Brew, Apple News and The Seattle Times). And I still use it to send and receive detailed responses from people I need to have detailed interactions with.

    So I remember that first time using email in 1992. And how magical it seemed to be. And 34 years later I can still say it’s the application I use most and I have no regrets about using it.

  • Travels By Michael Creighton

    PROMPT: One is one book that inspired you to travel

    I was never a Michael Creighton reader. Nothing against his writing, but his kinds of books just weren’t my highest priority in the finite amount of time I have in life.

    Until I discovered “Travels,” which some librarian in the Seattle Public Librarian system had decided to put out on a table as a recommended reading.

    How much I loved that book, with its short chapters documenting his travels one trip at a time. Of course, Creighton was a busy individual, what with being a best selling novelist, A-list director and a producer. And after each project he liked to unwind by traveling, usually to an off-the-trail non-touristy place that his travel agent would book for him.

    There were all kinds of travels he took, including scuba diving, venturing through the jungles of Southeast Asia, and my personal favorite of climbing Mount Kilamajoro. I thought these essays were interesting, efficient, honest and vulnerable, and also just captivating in the places they went.

    I will never be Michael Creighton. I’m not smart enough, driven enough, and organized enough to write best-selling commercial novels in my spare time. And I have no interest in being a movie producer or director. But how much fun it was to spend a few days dipping into the travels of his life, and I just love so much the unique way he chose to tell his story/memoir. And truth be told, it inspired me in my own way to travel a little bit off the beaten path when traveling and to not be afraid to try to blend in with the locals without worrying about the touristy-stuff. I’m on a five year break from these kinds of travels, but I expect that Larissa and I will pick it back up again in a different phase of our life.

  • I Miss File Clerks

    PROMPT: What technology do you miss and why?

    My first white collar job was at a mortgage company in 1986. I was an assistant to the Quality Control Manager, meaning my job was to organize and prepare loan files for her to audit to ensure the company was following proper loan procedures.

    Every day my boss would give me a list of four loan files she wanted to review, and my job was to get the files, make copies of those files, then organize them in the way she preferred so that she could efficiently review them.

    It was, in a word, a tedious job. I had to wear a tie, worked from 8:00am (not 8:05 but 8:00) to 5:00pm (not 4:55, but 5:00) with exactly a one hour lunch and two fifteen minute breaks, and the job itself was just drudgery. But there were two things I liked about the job: my manager, who was skilled and compassionate, and the file clerk.

    The file clerk was the best piece of technology I ever used in a role.

    When we needed a file, I simply filled out a brief quarter-page form in ink, walked it over to her desk, dropped it in her “in box,” and then when she had retrieved the file she dropped it on my desk with a “hello” and a smile. That was it.

    There was no searching. No trying to remember what the file was named. No use of any kind of editor to reorder the pages. I simply filled out the form, the file magically appeared on my desk, and then I could get to work by simply sifting through papers.

    My job back then was tedious. But so is the modern world. Trying to remember passwords, and application names, and file names. Have to search emails for links, and dual authentication, and trying to find things on a tiny screen. Back then, the file clerk did all of that for me. The hardest part of my job besides the drudgery was clearing out the occasional paper jams when I had to make copies. And never — not once — did I have to work overtime. No one I knew worked overtime. Partially because at 5pm the file clerk and all other clerks hit the road, and there was no one available to process any work that we completed anyway.

    So yes, my job was drudgery, but the convenience of the file clerk was amazing. We don’t live in a world of convenience. We live in a world where the inconvenience was just redistributed, and ultimately are required to work more hours.

    So when I’m asked what technology I miss most of all, that’s an easy one. I miss the file clerk. Patty, wherever you are 40 years later, I miss your skillset!