Everybody to get from street...

Here’s a thing new to me:

A couple of days ago my manager sent round an email asking for his staff members’ cell phone numbers. “I would like to be sure I have everyone’s proper numbers.”

Now, this isn’t the tech/business world where your employer demands that you be contactable all the hours God sends, and my work isn’t exactly mission-critical, so there’s no need to call me at 0330 demanding [some arcane datapoint over which I have no control anyway]. This is by way of me saying that so far I haven’t given out my mobile number to anyone at work.

A few members of the greater team immediately hit reply-all and handed over their digits, but I’ve so far abstained.

Then yesterday the CFO/CLO sent an all-staff email announcing that the company’s going to conduct a test of their “emergency contact process”. We’re supposed to reply to a group text so they can collect response-time data for…data collection purposes.

In theory this seems an okay thing. After all, our place of business is in downtown Washington, D.C., which could have emergency-bad things happen to it. And we are in the scientific arena, which makes us a potential target for Repugnant-Kleptocrat emergency-bad things, so I can see that they might want to be able to reach everyone in a timely manner to communicate emergency-bad things to us all.

(As an aside—why are there never emergency-good things? Wouldn’t it be nice if there were?)

But here’s the deal: yes, I have a mobile phone. But I do not live in it. It is literally on for less than one hour out of 24, while I’m on Metro. I occasionally turn it on if I need to check something on the Web, or I want to notify someone that I’m running late. I do not call people on it just to chat, and I only text as a last-measure form of communication.

And yet, despite me telling people I need to speak with about important matters that mobile is the worst possible way to reach me, I still turn on the thing to discover three-day-old voicemails or texts from yesterday morning.

Folks—the shelf-life of voicemails and texts is pretty short, so if I tell you that I don’t ever have the phone on, please use my preferred methods of communication: email or landline. Or else somehow just beam your important thoughts directly into my brain.

So, the upshot is: yeah, I’ll give my digits to my manager (although I suppose I could debate how “proper” they are), and yeah, I’ll try to remember to have the sodding thing on at the day and time of the planned emergency drill. But I’ll just point out that were this drill to be a real emergency-emergency, I’d still be in the street.