Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
I also told him that trying to talk to me while I was behind the computer was a very bad idea. ( Reason) |
At a previous employer, IT staffers were encouraged to install an IM client to be instantly reachable. I flatly refused without a direct order that I would protest. The issue was finally laid to rest in a conference call where a co-worker said "The nice thing about Dennis, is that if you call and he's at his desk, he picks up first ring. If he doesn't, he's
not at his deask, and you won't get him in IM, either!" (Bless him!)
I refused for your reason. I was a systems and telecom admin, and a lot of what I did required careful thought and planning. I needed to make sure I understood what the problem was and that what I did would solve it. I needed quiet and concentrated thought, and got quite enough interruptions, thank you.
(A huge peeve was the chap in the cube next to mine who would put his phone on speaker to have both hands free, then have long conversations wtih friends where I got of hear both sides. I have a problem. I can't
ignore speech. My mind insists on listening and trying to parse it. At home, my SO watches TV with headphones as a courtesy because of that.)
The underlying problem is what computer folks call stack processing. You can concentrate on one thing at a time. If you are interrupted, you must save your place, handle the interruption, then go back to what you were doing. Computers are
much better at that than people, and too often, the result of interruption is
losing your place and having to find your back. Productivity plummets.
(I've had amusing conversations with folk proud of their ability to multi-task who go on about how many things they can do at once. "And how many of those things do you actually
finish?" is a question that produces hostile responses...
)
And I've had conversations with technical peers where I've said "We are techs, but we report to non-technical managers. If we do our job well, we're
invisible. Everything Just Works. We only become visible when something breaks. We need to educate our bosses about just what is involved in seeing that things Just Work, so they can fairly evaluate us when performance reviews occur."
It's an uphill battle.
______
Dennis