High-Tech Harness Goes Everywhere

I like to think of the first TV ad as a sales pitch against personal hygiene. It stars a woman at home, dressed for success in bathrobe and slippers, professionally outfitted with phone, laptop and modem, bragging that she puts in a whole day of work before taking a shower.

The second ad is more of a pitch against working-mother guilt. This features a woman getting ready to abandon her neglected kids to a sitter when - Eureka! - she decides to take them to the beach and do business in a swimsuit, with a cell phone.

Now, these are not really public service ads to preserve water or mother-child relationships. They are telephone service ads selling the virtues of new communication. The idea is that these wonderful new tools can knock down the walls of the old office and set us free! Workers of the world, unite for cell phones!

Mind you, I don’t expect Madison Avenue to script documentaries. These are the folks who use “outback fantasies” to sell four-wheel vehicles to suburban parents whose greatest adventure is getting out of a snowbank on the way to hockey practice.

But what we have here is a 30-second version of the vast, ongoing nationwide hype about the personal advantages of the new technology. In one way or another, every maker of a fax, cell phone, laptop or pager is trying to convince us that their goal is to liberate people so they can work anywhere.

The dirty little secret they neglect to mention, however, is that people who can work anywhere, end up working everywhere.

We all know that Americans are spending more hours on the job. The typical two-earner couple works a day and a half more every week than in 1980. But it’s becoming less clear when and where the job ends.

Have you actually left work if you log on at home? Have you punched out if you’re checking voice mails from the car? Is it private time if there’s a fax waiting to be read when the kids are asleep?

And is the unshowered woman in her fuzzy slippers working at 10 a.m. or 10 p.m.?

Last winter, there was a story in The Wall Street Journal about a wife who drew the line when her husband brought his laptop to bed. So much for open marriage. Work has become the menage a trois of the plugged-in household. Home is not where the heart is, it’s where the satellite office is. Even those of us who aren’t officially telecommuting are tele-moonlighting.

As for time off, Americans now have an average of some 11 days of vacation a year, down from 12 days a decade ago. More of us are doing contract work, switching jobs or worrying about the ones we have. We not only get and take less vacation, we have more trouble actually vacating.

When President Clinton leaves Pennsylvania Avenue for a “remote” island he’s followed - from tee to tee - by a full complement of electronic equipment. How different are the trip takers who come bearing laptops along with their tennis rackets?

The cell phone has made it possible to hike around a national park with one foot in the office. The laptop makes it easy to check in from outward bound. Indeed, with the tools of our trades, we can now get anywhere - except, of course, away from it all.

I once heard a salesman extolling the new age of communication by bragging how you could get off the plane in Bali and check the office in Boise. It didn’t seem to occur to him that you might be going to Bali to check out of the office.

In fact, the creeping, dialing, logging-on assumption of our times is that no one is or should be ever truly out of touch. You can always take one teeny call or answer one itty-bitty message.

The problem with this new modem of living is the bargain it’s struck. You can take your body out of the workplace; you just can’t take your head out. There are more heads left behind when people go on vacation than luggage left in the Atlanta airport.

It is wholly perverse that a technology producing a new cohort of workaholics is being sold for its leisurely lifestyle. The idea that the new communications tools shall set us free is about as rational as the idea that you can conduct serious business with three preschoolers building sandcastles around your briefcase.

In reality, the oceanfront may well become another work site. But work will never be a day at the beach.