It doesn’t take a card-carrying frequent flier to know that traveling with technology can be traumatic. But it helps.
Chris Burgeson knows. A consultant for a San Diego software developer, he recently worried about getting data transferred between laptop computers – a topic this column devotes a lot of attention to precisely because it’s so unnerving.
“I don’t have a lot of downtime to spend transferring files from an old computer to a new one,” says the traveler. “Unfortunately, I also can’t do without all my important files and contact information. Factor in the additional pull of the holiday season and you have the makings of a potentially stressful situation.”
Bernard Deadman is vexed at cell phone manufacturers and carriers – specifically at Ericsson and AT&T. Along with a string of e-mail correspondence between himself and the cell phone provider that he recently sent me, Deadman observed that the racket is “very much about getting in every new user they can at any price, and has nothing to do with loyalty of the existing user base.”
He’s ready to pull the proverbial plug on his wireless device, and I’m left with the impression that Burgeson would have tossed his laptop long ago if he didn’t need it for work. In fact, many of us wonder if our lives might be simpler, and less nerve-racking, if we could just throw away our technology and go back to the way things were before the information revolution.
But could we?
A year ago, I asked a similar question in this column, in which I also assailed travelers for being e-mail dependent. That story, in turn, was a follow-up to the very first time I’d mused about e-mail addiction in 1997, back when the Internet was still relatively new, glamorous, not to mention something worth investing in.
“E-mail is the kind of thing that grows on you very gradually,” I observed. “Instead of calling someone, you e-mail. Instead of sending a paper letter, you e-mail. Instead of visiting in person, you e-mail. Soon you’re getting hundreds of electronic messages a day – and sending hundreds back.”
We already know that business travel is stressful. A recent survey of World Bank employees who traveled on business determined that they accounted for 80 percent more medical claims than employees who didn’t travel. Among the gripes: intestinal and diet complaints (all that fast food), respiratory infections (cabin air, no doubt), and back aches (coach seats), plus stress and anxiety (perhaps a result of technology headaches).
I didn’t have a clear idea of how to break this cycle, and it turns out that I wasn’t alone. At about the same time the second column appeared, I received an invitation to discuss the topic of “disconnecting” at a conference in the United States Virgin Islands. Participants were encouraged to leave their laptops at home and practice unplugging from their daily rituals of checking e-mail, voice mail and surfing the Web.
Although I went to St. John for professional reasons, I would be lying if I said the perks didn’t interest me. Caneel Bay, built by Laurance S. Rockefeller in 1955, is a luxurious 166-room property framed by a national park on one side and the Caribbean on the other. In addition to discussing the impact of technology on our lives, delegates were invited to do some “disconnecting” of their own – sailing, hiking, diving and relaxing.
Best of all, the “disconnect” took place in the dead of winter, when everyone else up north was braving sub-zero temperatures.
But the most telling part of the event weren’t the discussions about our tenuous relationships with technology, but what the attendees did about it.
On the first day of the conference, when most of us were still acclimating to the Caribbean, several delegates disappeared to the hotel’s business center to check their e-mail. So much for disconnecting.
By Day Two, they’d become bolder. One speaker boasted that his cell phone worked on the island. Another didn’t take any chances – he had bought his satellite phone with him.
By the end of the event, all pretenses of disconnecting had been unceremoniously cast aside. Many delegates openly discussed the best times to use the resort’s business center, while others shamelessly toted their laptops with them. The talk about “disconnecting” had become highly theoretical. In practice, none of us could ever disconnect, not even if we wanted to.
Two conclusions can be drawn from this somewhat futile (but fun) exercise in disconnecting and the experiences of you, the road warriors who have to cope with the stress of technology every day. First, it may be impossible to completely unplug yourself from your PC, cell phone or PDA. It may not even be worth your effort to try.
Second, the best we can probably do is to manage the technology instead of letting it manage us. This means finding a way to control the data transfer between notebooks, as Burgeson did. Or getting a new cell phone provider, as Deadman might (and probably should). For the delegates of the Caneel Bay “disconnect” conference, it means controlling the irrepressible urge to check e-mail and phone messages – in effect, to impose their will on the technology instead of vice versa.
I can’t promise it will dramatically improve your next trip, but it could certainly lessen your stress.
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