“I don’t even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.”
— Umberto Eco
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.
– Donald Knuth
I’m not quite as extreme as Eco or Knuth — I check my email quite often. No, I’m merely terrible at answering my phone. I only have a cell, and I tend to leave it on vibrate… in the clothes hamper, in the pocket of a pair of pants I wore yesterday.
Let me explain: It’s not that I don’t want to talk to people, or anything like that. Really, it boils down to establishing some boundaries in order to protect my ability to concentrate. The things I do for a living require a lot of concenctration, and so do many of the things I do for fun as well. If I can’t concentrate, I can’t get anything done, and I certainly don’t have any fun. When I’m deep in thought about some piece of code I’m working on, ringing phones are frustrating and aggrivating. Often, I have to backtrack a few steps and rethink the last bit of whatever I was mulling over. Putting this in comp sci terms — a context switch is expensive.
A few decades ago, people weren’t expected to get anything done on an airplane. There were no TV ads in taxicabs. Now, we’re bombarded with all sorts of stimuli. I may not be able to get away from everything, but I can bury my phone in the clothes hamper. Email is much more tolerable because I can ignore that for five minutes while I finish up what I’m doing. Obviously, by this rationale, if you tell me when you’re going to call, we have absolutely no problem. Since I know you’re calling, I’ll be sure not to be in the middle of something.
Otherwise, I’m sorry to be a mule-headed New Englander, but… I’m unlikely to answer your call. It’s nothing personal, and rest assured that I’m working on something important. Or playing Grand Theft Auto….