« Ed Brayton on Drawing Religious Battle Lines
Main
Was Abdi-Heba a New Man in Jerusalem? »
September 13, 2006
On the Fine Art of Unavailability
As some of you may know I work very part time for a small company and something came my way last week that reminded me of two occasions in my more active professional life that now amuse me.
Many years ago, actually before I went into marketing, I had three offices, each about fifteen or twenty miles from the other. I had quite separate duties in each office. While I seldom took advantage of the fact, having three offices was great if one wanted to perfect the art of unavailability. No one ever knew for sure where you were and when you seemed to be nowhere it was naturally assumed that you were in transit.
In the middle of my career there was about a two year period during which I had two offices. One was about 5500 miles from each other. One was in Newport Beach California and the other was in Tokyo. On average, I would spend about three weeks at my Newport Beach office, living at home with my wife and family and then two weeks at my Tokyo office living in a hotel. But this was not a set routine. On one occasion, I flew to Tokyo for dinner and flew home the next day! You might think that this arrangement too would be good if one wanted to be unavailable. But, in my experience, it was anything but that. Your coworkers assume that you are available twenty-four hours a day. When I was in Tokyo calls would come throughout the night from Newport Beach and while the Tokyo staff was somewhat more considerate, there were occasions when they thought the middle of my night was a good time to give me a call. Obviously, I tried to discourage this but even threatening to fire one individual did not deter him. At that time, he was a product line manager who was working for me in Newport Beach. Later he went on to great things. When I was in Tokyo he would call me in the middle of the night at least once a week. The conversations always began in the same way.
The phone in my hotel room would ring and more asleep than awake I would pick it up. The following conversation would ensue.
Duane: Hello???
Vijay: Duane?
Duane: Yeah?
Vijay: This is Vijay!
Duane: Vijay, this sure better be important!
Vijay: What time is it there? (He knew perfectly well what time it was.)
Duane: 2:30 a.m.!!!
Vijay: Oh, I only have thirteen things to go over with you.
Having offices that are many time zones apart where you spend large contiguous blocks of time at each, is no help if you truly want to be unavailable.
What triggered these remembrances was the receipt of a business card from someone I am currently working with in connection with my part time job. This person has so many addresses and phone numbers that he must list them on the back of his card. As far as I can tell, his home office is in Shanghai but he also has an office in Nanjing and another in Shenzhen and two offices in the United States, one in Canada and still another in Taiwan. Last week I exchanged emails with him while he was in Tokyo for the week. While this guy has been very available to me, I'll bet there are occasionally several weeks in a row when even he doesn't know where he is.
Posted by Duane Smith at September 13, 2006 9:14 AM | Read more on Humor |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1866
Comments
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
Send me an email if it is important.