Journey vs. Destination

I once worked with a guy in Ohio. We worked very closely (the closest and best experience I’ve ever had with pair programming). One morning, I noticed he’d made some modifications to the code after I’d gone to bed. I told him I found that a little disturbing given he was three hours ahead of me; the commit must have occurred in the middle of his night. He replied that he had the same sense of temporal dislocation whenever he received email from me before he woke up.

Being on the east coast has given me time lag in ways I didn’t expect. Since we drove, the traditional jet lag wasn’t an issue. We acclimated to local time better than our gadgetry did (https://logicalelegance.com/journey/2012/05/time-flies-like-a-banana/).

However, when I open email upon waking (as per my normal “did the world survive eight hours without me?” addiction), my inbox is sadly empty. Oh, it may have a spam or two from midnight but even the email lists are oddly silent.

I’m generally a morning person so I’m accustomed to a trickle of email in the morning, happy to have fewer interruptions while I get something done. But this is disturbing. A couple of times I’ve wondered if I should handle some issue that came up late the day before, even though I’m on vacation, since no one seems to be doing anything and it is after 11am. Then I realize my colleagues will be getting to work shortly.

I’ve also had little bursts of apprehension when a flood of email comes in after dinner: none of these issues seem worthy of work late for, why am I getting so many at 9pm? Oh, right, this is the end of the day wrap up and the followups are all the tiny-chatty emails people send from the train.

It is weird to think that email has patterns. Failure of these patterns are more disconcerting to me than the other difference we’ve experienced on this trip. Maybe it is because I expected many of the other variances but this one hit me unexpectedly, in a place I didn’t know to be vulnerable.