Journey vs. Destination

When my husband occasionally declares it is going to be an Internet-free weekend, I know this means he’ll be asking me for all the news and weather and general ‘net hijinks. I don’t participate in the disconnecting. I like to believe it is because I’m not as addicted to the web.

When we go on vacation, I usually monitor email from my phone. Working for myself, it is fairly important that I don’t piss off clients. Even if they know I’m out of the office, their problems are (of course) super high priority. (My eyes rolled just typing that.) But I will admit that I like to feel needed.

I remember in 1999, when I worked at HP, having it be almost noon and I hadn’t gotten any email. It was surprising. I’d gotten a lot of work done but at some point started to wonder if something was broken. I checked my Ethernet cable (remember those? someday no one will believe us that they even existed), I surfed the web to make sure it was still there. But everything worked. I wailed in my cubicle that no one loved me. After lunch, there were several messages waiting and I felt much better.

This is an enduring and ingrained feeling. Getting a ton of email while I’m out of the office indicates a lack of preparedness on my part. But getting one or two? Well, that’s just love.

On my recent extended vacation, I monitored my email, ignoring lists and focusing on the few things addressed to me. It boiled down to two job inquiries, a dozen emails from friends trying to set up lunches or checking on my progress, and about a half dozen work things almost all starting with “if you have a minute, could you tell me how to…”.

I didn’t miss email while I was gone. And if I had, the hundreds of emails that I didn’t read would have cured that (lists mostly but they usually have a kernel of something I need or I’d unsubscribe).

However, while I didn’t fully realized it until I got going again, I missed working. I missed fixing things. I missed typing a line in and seeing if it made things better. I missed the puzzle of figuring out which steps are important and which are voodoo. I missed finding ways of explaining complex ideas in a simple matter so the team could discuss them more easily. I missed getting things done.

This is what I’m good at. I’m glad to be back.