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Russell Mickler, Principal Consultant, has over 17 years of professional experience leading and managing IT organizations.
Why Do All the Crazies Talk to Me?
Written on August 3, 2008
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So I woke up early on Sunday and drove to Cannon Beach on the Oregon Coast. I wanted to get a little work done and spend a little me-time aside sand and surf. I brought my iPod, my laptop, my digital camera, and my Blackberry; I’d been Yahoo! instant messaging to people all morning. I went into a cafe, graded a few papers, responded to some student and client email, opened up a port on a firewall for a client, and uploaded a few pictures I took. It was a fantastically productive morning, really.
Then, out of the blue, this crazy old guy saunters up to me and eyes me (with that quirky, pirate-looking squint that only old people who actually _live_ at the beach could possibly do) and says, leaning over me, “Leave it at home!” With that strange look of Cap’n Ahab he then smiles (at his own joke, myself, I was a little nervous and taken off-guard), and then lumbers off to go terrorize somebody else for the morning.
Whew, that was close. Like, he was referring to my laptop, but I think he was also referring to the camera USB’d into it, the Blackberry on the side of the table, and the iPod in my ears. I didn’t have the time nor the interest to really explain it to him – you see, if I had left “it” at home, then I couldn’t be here. I couldn’t have worked. Yet, I couldn’t have played, either.
It takes both: work finances play. Sure I can skip out and go to the coast for a day, but somebody’s got to pay for it so I have to carve out some time to do so, but this weird and archiac notion (work is “over there” and play is “over there”) is whacked to me. Play and work are intertwined in the same space, and, like tech, can accompany me anywhere. Even here. In this cafe. On the beach. So why should I leave “it” at home? Shouldn’t “it” be anywhere I go? My music, my peeps, my work, my play, my pictures? I am where I am; my work is where I go; isn’t “it” where you go? Shouldn’t it be?
Meanwhile, I seriously wonder where Ahab is. He’s certainly not here – not here and now, not with me anyway – in understanding that time and space for all things (play and work) are but one for the modern, roaming, geeky samurai… SIGH. I’m looking forward to getting more done this afternoon and taking a long walk in the sand.