In this modern world of multi-tasking, i.e. driving a car, smoking a cigarette, and carrying a conversation on the cell phone, I am beginning to react in a negative manner.
Today, I was trying to finalize a purchase at an office supply store. All of the checkout clerks were wired with headsets and were answering the telephone, communicating amongst themselves, and trying to process transactions at the checkout, all at the same time. As I was attempting to check out, I had a question about the pricing (It was a sale item). I could tell that the clerk was talking to someone, but she was obviously not hearing what I was saying. She kept asking me to swipe my card. Sometimes I long for the day when a person was asked to do only one thing at a time. That seems a reasonable request.
I hate that everyone is expected to multi-task these days. Not only because of the rudeness that it can cause (as your experience shows), but because of the simple fact that I can’t multi-task.
OK, I can walk and chew gum at the same time, but that’s about the extent of my multi-tasking abilities. I can’t talk on the phone and watch TV at the same time. I can’t drive and talk on my cell phone, the couple of times I’ve tried to do it I’ve scared myself. I can’t listen to music while I’m trying to do anything that requires thinking. Forget about trying to have a couple of different conversations while trying to do some other work at the same time.
It’s all getting pretty nerve-wracking. But Doug, I think it really is that we are getting older. Isn’t this how older people have always felt. Like the world was going to hell in a hand basket? Too much rushing around and noise? You’re considered a slacker if you get eight hours of sleep. I also hate the phrase “Swipe your card”. What does swipe mean? I thought it meant to steal. I am only just starting to know what they are talking about when they say it. Another thing, it wouldn’t hurt if people would enunciate more clearly. Oh, see, it’s my hearing.
I am guilty of the age thing. It seems my hearing is not what it used to be. I have had several encounters with cashiers who blurted out some instruction or question too softly and/or all jumbled together like it was one word. On one occasion I had to ask her to repeat it four times and I still only got enough of it to decline the offer of a “special” three year warranty on my purchase.
I, also, don’t multitask well. I attribute that to being a male. My wife can juggle several things at once but I often think she would do them all better if she did only one at a time.
Maybe it’s partially an age related condition but I’m capable of multitasking when I have to. The big question for me is “why”?
I’m fed up with the notion, prodded and encouraged by popular media, that everyone should always be busy with 20 things at once. Why?
When you step back and take a good look there are very few things that require such immediate attention that you cannot at least finish what you’re doing before moving on to the next task.
I get especially get annoyed when I see people at the coffee shop (not Starbucks) or on an airplane with stacks of file folders and a laptop who seemingly feel compelled to be at their desks twenty four hours a day.
The cell phone advertising is equally guilty of propagating the idea that you are somehow less than human if you aren’t always within easy reach of everyone on earth.
I’m okay with multi-tasking and want more of it. I get frustrated by the store clerk who is serving someone ahead of me and has to suspend that transaction. For example the customer ahead goes off for another item. The clerk stands there and smiles. I assume in supermarkets it’s because the register can only handle one order at a time, but it happens in other settings too. It seems like service providers are trained to see finish every interaction before acknowledging the next person.
Not to hijack this thread, or worse, necessitate it moving to the Controversial forum–
But, Doug’s post reminds me of a conversation I was having last night with a friend of mine who is a Catholic priest. He recommended the work of an spiritual author who talks about the impediments to the “felt presence of God,” in modern, Western life. There is so many and so much connections now among people that people are less and less able to actually connect. And there’s a risk in these lifestyles of not having enough space or time or channels or energy–or whatever it is–to detect the presence of the Divine.
Allowing of course for those of you who don’t have it or believe it anyway.
Should work on the main reference desk of a library in a major city. We have six telephone lines, three desks and only three librarians if that, mostly two at a time to look after all the needs.
I have been helping people solve an internet problem at their terminal with someone else butting in and asking if I know if I have a book in the library, meanwhile the telephones are ringing, all at the same time. By the time I get back to my desk I have four voice messages that I have to answer, three email Ask a Librarian questions that also need to be answered, and five people lined up looking for help. The other librarian at the desk is in the same boat.
And in the new year they want to do a trial project of instant messaging reference questions at our reference desk, at the same time with all the other aspects that the public can reach us.
But I am also finding that people are ruder, impatient, and they can’t and won’t wait for an answer. While helping someone locate a book or helping them with an assignment, I (we) have been chased and followed by other people wanting help “immediately” and refuse to wait their turn at the desk. I have also been told to answer the dam question pretty fast, that they can’t wait for me to get back to them.
We have been threaten because we just didn’t find the answer the person wanted, even when we spent time finding what they needed in another library (at one of our branches or the university library). We are the biggest public library in the city but even we don’t have everything everybody needs at the time they needed it.
You aren’t multitasking until you have worked on a library’s referenced desk.
At the end of the day, I have very little respect or liking for the general public these days and it crosses all ethnic, social, economic classes! In our instant gratiification and I’m more important than you attitude, no wonder graduating librarians aren’t going into public library service.
I’ve discovered as I get old(er) that I’m simply fed up with being nice all the time, sick of being polite and letting the person in front of me go back for something else, tired of laughing with the clerk as she stops to change the paper in her register or to ask the manager walking by if she can have Friday off. I’m afraid I’m turning into a “character.” I let people know how I feel much more than I ever used to… and it’s frequently negative. If I had a question for a clerk who was obviously talking to someone else while “helping” me, I’m afraid I’d say something very much to the point.
And… one little multi-tasking thing that annoys me is the dayplanner. I’ve always said that anybody who needs a dayplanner needs to reevaluate their life.
MarkB, get a number system (as in “Take a Number”). People dread seeing these systems because they know you can make them toe the line with it regardless how important they think their needs.
For line-ups at places I go to a lot I retaliate by doing things I know they hate, like walk out and leave a cart full of groceries in the line. Or if I have to sit twenty minutes in a drive-through after giving my order, and they tell me they don’t have what I want by the time I finally get to the window, I just cancel the rest of the order that they have already assembled. Stuff like this bothers them, but they get the message, too.
I agree about dayplanners. I hate to be regulated, even by myself. I prefer to let things go to hell and then see what really needs attention at the end of it.
I just got back from the shops. Before I sat down at the computer I did all the following simultaneously:
Unpacked shopping and put it away (a lot of it)
Found something in freezer
Heated up pan of soup
Grilled two mackerel fillets (required turning half-way)
Opened kitchen window to get fishy smell out
Made mug of tea
Found the veg for tea tonight
Sorted out pub money for tonight incl. correct change for taxi home
Listened to Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto and pum-pummed along to it.
All this went like a well-oiled machine. The beauty of it was that there was no-one else in the house.
My nomination for the “Multi-tasker Who Needs a Kick in the Pants” award:
The patient who insists on answering/talking on their cell phone about other matters while their doctor is trying to discuss the reason for their visit or carry out their physical exam.
I can’t believe how common this is in our medical practice. And we have signs up all over telling people to TURN OFF YOUR DAMN CELL PHONE! (Okay, the signs are a little more polite than that, but that’s what they mean.)
How about this for multitasking that often ends in disaster. Trying to play the end of one tune whilst desperately trying to remember how the next tune in the set starts.
Multi-tasking and the general rush of today’s lifestyle is leading to an overall increase in rudeness which leads to a further increase in rudeness to the point where I begin to wonder whether rudeness and entropy are not related.
People have become more impatient because everyone (well, it appears the majority of people) wants everything NOW (sympathizing with MarkB’s comments). This is one of the origins of multi-tasking; if you’re not willing to wait, you have to do everything NOW. So you have a shrinking minority of people who are willing to be courteous (e.g., who accept waiting in line or at a stop light) who eventually get pissed off enough to give up and join the ranks of the rude. It seems it’s that or be everyone else’s doormat because so very few other people are willing to act courteously in return. I particularly see this when it comes to car traffic interactions but I won’t go there.
I do not think rudeness is justified just because you’re having to deal with others who are rude or incompetent (even though this component is growing). I know there may be a feeling of “letting them have a taste of their own medicine”, but usually inconsiderate people aren’t aware enough to understand the lesson. I get angry when I have to deal with rude people (and I include the current cellphone lack-of-etiquette in the rudeness category), but if you join them, then what do you have to b_tch about? Set an example - a lot of younger people don’t have one. There aren’t enough good examples out there.
Okay, off my soap box. Sorry, sort of a digression but I made the association between multi-tasking and rudeness after reading some of the other comments.
BAN CELLPHONES! Somehow we got along without them ten years ago…(of course, I’m not serious…much)
), but I have noticed an increase in this as well.
