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08 February 2007

Business Etiquette

The Candidate was supposed to come on the conference call at 8:30PM, Eastern Standard Time. I think he was back in New Mexico, where he maintains his day-job as the Governor. It would be considerably earlier there, still light. He had been back here for the Democratic offsite meeting, and the website said he got seven standing ovations during his stirring remarks.

That is what the e-mail invitation said, anyway, and offered a way to dial into a nation-wide conference call to hear the latest from the man himself.

I checked my calendar. It was too cold and too dark to go out. I clicked on the link to accept, and was presented with a screen containing the number to call, and the pass-code for access.

I made dinner and watched the news as I waited for the appropriate minute to call in.

You would never try to dial-in to a conference call at the time they advertise. I know the procedure because since I retired from the Government I have had to learn how Business does Business. In order to not get locked out in the cold, you must call a few minutes early.

It is an adaptation. I used to work in a vault, and we were not supposed to talk about what we did outside it. All our papers and notes and computers were sealed up inside.

The hours were long, but the work could not go home. In a perverse sort of way, it was pretty neat.

Since that time I have had to learn about productivity. In my first job out of in the private sector, the company was pretty intent on knowing where we were all the time, but that was only to be expected, since nearly all of us were recently retired government folks. But we had been on ice all those years, and that is one of the reasons the Government cannot do much for itself anymore. It is so balled up in policy and procedures that it can't move. Society is running rings around it. The cell-phone and wireless access to the web has changed everything, and the law is always a couple steps behind.

Shoot, kids are getting wounded in combat and calling their mothers from the battlefield before the corpsman can get to them.

I worked for the Phone Company after my first experience in modern business, and it was much further from the Government. The corporate culture was considerably different. The organization was much smaller than it had been before the big breakup, and as a consequence of its history, was spread over a lot of real estate. One of my managers lived in Florida, and another in New Jersey.

It was a novel concept, and it did not make a great deal of sense to me, but I got used to it. Based on geography, they did a lot of business via conference calls. We tended to take the calls in the office downtown at the bus station. It made sense to get up, slog through the traffic, and be at the desk at a reasonable hour. I gradually came to realize that there were people on the calls who were at rest stops, or in corn-fields, or places where dogs were barking that sounded a lot like home.

I put the facts together, and realized that the cost of having people spread all over heaven's half acre was that Fridays were a travel day, or maybe Thursday night, and that people bunkered themselves in their home offices on Friday to take care of the paperwork from traveling all week.

It grated a bit, as I listened to calls with dogs in the background, and wished I could remove my tie. It was a breakthrough when I took my first conference call, flat on my back, and realized what remarkably flexibility this capability provided in terms of working. The Phone Company provided us lap-tops and a quirky virtual private network, so we could actually work anywhere there was wireless access, in airports or parking structures or even in the safety and comfort of our own homes.

It was a guilty pleasure, though, as I realized that first time when I could not take my usual detailed notes, looking up at the ceiling.

I really liked the people I worked with at the Phone Company, and it was always a relief to finish one of those disembodied calls and walk out of my office to one of my co-workers and talk about what had just been discussed. It was better than working. Sometimes we would take the calls together, with the speaker phone on “mute,” and then go out to lunch.

It was actually sort of fun, and the mute button was a matter of constant interest, since you did not want to disclose, accidentally, what you were actually thinking. It was a matter of etiquette, just like telling someone you called that they were on speaker, and who was there in the room listening. It was only a courteous, since I assume that many calls had secret lurkers, invisible co-workers in some other state smirking and making gestures on the other side of a desk.

It was also a bit intimidating to have several people virtually drop right in through a ringing phone, but that is the way things are.

The mute button was absolutely essential for decorum. Sometimes it was not the dog in the background, but just the rattle of finger on keys that let you know that some of the audience on the call were multi-tasking, which is the polite way of saying they were paying no attention whatsoever, just having their ears perked up to see if they name was called.

The other matter of phone courtesy was how you passed rumors. One was expected to always ask if the speaker phone was on, and if it was, request it to be turned off to keep sensitive matters confidential.

The whole thing seemed unique, and I figured it was due to the history of the company, and the fact that the phone company would be expected to use the phone a lot.

It was not until a foreign company purchased the Phone Company that I realized I might have to find another line of work. There were no bad feelings. I helped to manage a niche line of work for them, and the acquisition preserved the larger commercial venture to compete in a larger global market.

But I found myself once more learning a new corporate culture. My new company is an impressive outfit, and I am proud to be on the payroll. One of the selling points was that I could largely work from my home.

I was eager to take that one, and shed the commute in the awful Washington traffic altogether. It was not until I got a little more into it that I realized the ultimate hazard of the home office. You might not like your co-workers, and it completely eliminates the difference between working and being off the clock.

You are never off the clock at home.

But consequently, I do a lot of business on the phone these days, and when I dialed into the Governor's conference call, I realized that the larger America is not quite ready for the future. We might al be on the internet, but we are not ready for the conference call. There was no discipline. No one understood the concept of the “mute” button. The reverberation of a thousand lives all poured into the conference like the hiss of the ancient short-wave radio.

The Governor carried his dignity well, despite the chaos, and he said that the relative disadvantage in funds against Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton would be made up by outreach to us on conference calls, and through blogs and e-mails. I liked his approach on the issues, and was buoyed by his approach. He was declaring a Howard Dean-style techno-guerrilla campaign over the next two years that would carry us to victory.

That is a long campaign, I thought. When it came time for Questions and Answers, someone should have helped the Governor. It was bedlam.

I could hear dogs barking in the background, and voices from New Mexico stepped all over voices from Massachusetts. I wanted to say something, but there was no etiquette that would have permitted it. That is the new democracy, which is changing as dramatically as business is.

We will just have to learn how to do it. I am pretty sure that it cannot be done flat on your back. But I could be wrong, and it occurs to me the position is natural in politics, and always has been. It prepares you for the only thing the Government really does do best.

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