My life as a digital consultant is not that easy. It moves from never-ending international travels to never-ending days of online meetings. It is one way or another; there is no happy medium.
When I’m abroad, I miss home.
When I’m home, I would like to be elsewhere just because those long “remote” days, driven by Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Webex, GoToMeeting, 3CX, Jitsi Meet, make me feel like Tommy (featured image here), the protagonist of the 1975 film directed by Ken Russell, based on the 1969 album of the same name by the British musical group The Who, one of the first rock operas in history.
Tommy was blind, mute and deaf. Me too. Here’s why.
The book of nonsense
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- “Can you hear me?”
- “Can you see my screen?”
- “Let’s get started.”
- “Sorry, I was on mute.”
- “I need to hop off/drop.”
- “Is my audio clear?”
- “Let me know if there’s a sound issue.”
- “Hello everyone”
- “Thanks for joining”
- “You are breaking up.”
- “Please raise your hand.”
- “Sorry, quick question.”
- “Thank you all for attending”
Do you feel that cold shiver down your back by reading these phrases? It’s like a B-movie. A horror movie to be precise.
Things get worse when you have to run the presentation during the online meeting:
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- You have to make a presentation
- You have to have a meeting about the slides that you have to make for the meeting
- And then you have to have another meeting to show people the slides for that meeting to make sure you’re all aligned on the slides for the meeting
- And then you go to the meeting
- And then you have a meeting after the meeting to talk about the meeting and the to-do’s that came from that meeting
- Then you do some of the to-do’s
- And then you have an alignment meeting to align on if the to-dos are being done
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Is it legal?? You have just one privilege though, what Mr. Mackey (the former guidance counselor at South Park Elementary) is showing us here below:
Let’s be honest with ourselves, because everyone thinks the same, don’t be scared, we are in a safe place here. Most of the time:
A meeting is the behavioral equivalent of a placebo: it makes us feel like we’re doing something, even when we’re not.
At my age, a canceled meeting provides more dopamine than a night out!
That meeting could have been an email
Now let’s move to “The Dark Side of the Moon”, my Pink Floyd fans: emails.
It is a fact that a lot of meetings are useless and can be replaced by just an email. But what is the boundary between being professional and being rude in an email? I’m having some problems clearly seeing the edge, because this is how I feel:
Born to write: Can you not read? I already told you this, do I need to repeat myself?
Forced to write: “Per my last email…”
Born to write: No, that is impossible, but I don’t want to deal with your reaction.
Forced to write: “Let me see what I can do.”
Born to write: You are ignoring my urgent request, and I am annoyed.
Forced to write: “Just circling back on this.”
Born to write: I need you to read this now because it affects you.
Forced to write: “I wanted to share something…”
Born to write: I am creating a paper trail because I don’t trust you to do what you said.
Forced to write: “As per our conversation…”
Born to write: You ignored me.
Forced to write: “I’m not sure if you saw my last email.”
But remember! In the corporate world, emails are no longer used as the primary communication channel between colleagues or clients, they serve as a repository of evidence in case anyone tries to scam you!
At the end of the day, I started thinking that I should put the following picture in my email signature, and see what happens 😉
And the Oscar for the most unbearable thing goes to…. Instant Messaging!
WhatsApp. Discord. WeChat. Slack. Telegram. Skype (RIP…). Facebook Messenger. Line. Viber. LiveChat. Zendesk. LinkedIn. You can’t hide yourself forever in there! They can see when you are available, and you are receiving those noisy red numbers popping up on your workstation, tablet, smartphone. You are trapped.
And so here we are, my older brother Billy (Corgan – founder and frontman of The Smashing Pumpkins), as you clearly explained in 1995 in the masterpiece “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness”:
(taken from “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” masterpiece music video, mandatory to re-watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-r-V0uK4u0)
But hey! When none of the above works, the worst nightmare of Gen Z arises: phone calls!
To be continued…?
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Stay data-hungry. Stay data-foolish.
Your Friendly Neighborhood Digital Consultant