Phoning it in

Still, I must admit to a secret thrill when a restaurant has replaced its menu with a QR code. It’s a silly superstition, as we all know — COVID-19 isn’t transmitted via menus or wine lists, so it’s a little like going to the “barber” in the 14th century to get bled in order to release the bad “humors” — but on the other hand, it’s essentially a free pass to use your phone.

“What was the fish thing again?” I ask. “Let me just check,” I say, as I pick up my phone and quickly scan for messages and fun Instagrams while pretending to investigate how the sea bass is cooked.

Which is why the best practice is to keep the phone in the pocket.

The result is that it buzzes, insistently, in my pocket every time an email or text message comes in, giving me a distracted and slightly stressed-out air my dining companions find both unattractive and baffling. It would be a lot more honest and forthrightly rude, which is why I don’t do it, to just put the thing on the table and check it incessantly.

There is zero scientific evidence for what I’m about to claim, but I’m about to claim it anyway: When the phone buzzed in my pocket, I knew it was from one of my producing partners on a new television project, asking about the script I’m supposed to be writing.

In the middle of a pretty glamorous party, surrounded by fully vaxxed and tested, well-dressed and entertaining people, I felt the dread of the unread work-related email festering in my pocket.

The email was, in verbatim, this: “Just checking in on the script and wondering when we’ll see a draft. Obviously need it as soon as possible. Happy New Year.”

What kind of person, I said to my friends at the table when I returned from an unnecessary trip to the men’s room to check my phone, sends that kind of email on New Year’s Eve? What kind of sick sociopath nags a person about a work deliverable, especially during a week that everyone knows is spent doing nothing?

“When is the script due?” one of my friends asked.

“Three weeks ago,” I said.

Which struck them all as significant, I suppose, since they each exchanged meaningful — and, to me, highly annoying — smirks.

Did I not wonder, one of them asked, what makes a person who is chronically behind schedule with work, perpetually 15 minutes late, and deeply averse to deadlines nevertheless carry his phone around to receive each reminding and demanding email the second it arrives?

I do not wonder that, I told them.

Could it not be guilt? Could it possibly be that instead of simply meeting deadlines and being on time, I use the phone and its buzzing as a kind of displacing busyness — all emails and messages and distracting transactions designed to imitate actual work without requiring, you know, actual work?

How about if I resolve in 2022 to manage my time better, to be prompt for appointments and events? When you’re even-steven with the world, my friends told me, you don’t need to carry around a nagging machine in your pocket.

“How much do I owe you for this therapy session?” I asked, trying to be clever. But the point was made. They were right. I spend more time, and endure more stress, avoiding and delaying and being late with projects than I do just sitting down to do them. Maybe, I thought to myself, 2022 is the year I stop doing that.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and was about to shut it off when I noticed a few more texts and emails had come in. I quickly scrolled through them — just checking to see if anything important had been sent — and then looked up to my friends to announce my 2022 goal to stop checking my phone all the time.

But they were already wishing each other a Happy New Year. I had missed the countdown. 2022 was starting off in a troubling way.

Rob Long is a television writer and producer and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.