Communication will be the death of us all

Don’t look now but there’s a new devastating sickness on the horizon. It’s called communication.

Seriously, communication is going to be the death of us if we don’t watch out. Companies are simply going to have to start implementing procedures to prevent employees from burning out in their early 20s. We simply can’t go on like this. I don’t think we were ever meant to.

Let me demonstrate what I am getting at. I was chatting a while ago with an elderly woman in a queue in which we were waiting to renew our annual motor car licences. It occurred to me that she would probably live to be 100 years old because, unlike most of us who do our banking on our home computers via the Internet, she seemed very proud of the fact that she got into her car to go and draw money and then drove around town paying her accounts.

She didn’t have a cellphone or even an answering machine. She was not remotely interested in having a video recorder and didn’t watch satellite TV because she was so used to where SABC 1,2 and 3 were on the remote.

She wrote letters to her children on paper and walked down to the corner shops to post them. She got her son to print out e-mails and give her the piece of paper to read.

On the other hand, like many of my peers, I do everything by cellphone and e-mail via a modem that connects to the Internet. Everything happens quickly and efficiently. Well, sometimes it doesn’t — and that causes enormous stress.

Unlike that elderly woman in the licence queue, I don’t go to the bank anymore. I don’t seem to have the time to get in the car, look for parking and side-step crowds of shoppers.

I do it all over the Internet and if it takes more than two minutes for me to do my monthly banking chores, I get as tetchy as a bulldog without a car to chase.

And unlike the woman in the licence queue, I continually wonder why time is flying by so fast.

Admit it, you’ve also been very much aware that the long awaited year 2000 went by in a flash. That it’s long gone — old hat. Even those bottles of champagne with which we celebrated the turn of the century are looking dusty and jaded.

And its not because as parents we’re getting old that time seems to fly by so fast. Our kids are also beginning to complain about tempus fugitting at an incredible rate of knots.

What’s happening is quite simply that communication has sped up. We don’t have to have meetings anymore, we can have video conferences. We don’t have to wait for letters, we can get instant e-mails. We don’t have to return phone calls, we’re always available on our cell phones.

This can’t possibly be good for us. Even when we go on holiday, the ubiquitous cellphones and laptops are so readily at hand it is almost impossible to resist the temptation to check up on what’s going on in the office.

I find I can’t even go to the bathroom in peace without taking my cellphone and electronic diary, just to avoid having to call someone back to set something up.

And I am not alone; this is the way of all the world.

So, in addition to myriad other challenges business has to face, it is going to have to come to grips with this dangerous phenomenon because we’re getting to the point of doing business so quickly that we’re beginning to look like that movie comedian hanging on to the back of the train with his legs pounding away in a blur.

Just what is the answer? It’s not simple, that’s for sure. Communication is like a drug; it gets to become a habit that is almost impossible to break.

And no company can expect its employees to look after themselves when it comes to taking a break from what has become a completely frenetic, almost hysterical rat-race.

They’re going to have to insist on frequent leave. Insist on laptops and cellphones being handed in before departure.

Am I beginning to sound a little hysterical about all this? I hope so, because business has a nasty reputation for simply ignoring things such as HIV/Aids and anything else that is threatening; These are always seen as someone else’s problem.

This painful new disease called communication is our problem, and it’s going to bite us all badly before we know it.

All of the aforegoing gives praying for peace a new and urgent meaning.