It must be grouchy old man week at Isotropic. Anyway …
One of my favorite bloggers has this to say about the expectation of instantaneous response to text or email messages:
First: If you are the sort of person who believes that all your e-mails/texts must be responded to instantaneously or sooner, you may be a self-absorbed twit. John Scalzi, I’ll Get Back to You When I Get Back To You
Quite a funny post, along with the ensuing commentary.
I plead guilty to being excessively slow to respond to personal email in particular … as in days or weeks. It’s not really intentional, more that once it scrolls out of the current window I’m likely to forget about it until I happen across it sometime later. Particularly if I get a message during the day I’ll plan on responding to it “this evening”. I have little or no sense of time, so a day or a week seem about the same to me; thus, “this evening” may turn into “next month”. Sigh.
Text I usually try to respond to within a few minutes, but it depends on what I’m involved with at the moment. I do have my phone set to emit an obnoxious siren if I don’t at least acknowledge (to it) within 5-10 minutes that I received text/IM/mail. However, on my laptop I have IM set to no sound, auto-minimize, so those messages I may not even notice for minutes or hours. Occasionally I am even asleep or otherwise separated from my electronic tethers devices.
Sometimes the phone system decides to make things worse by routing your text via the Moon or Mars relay first; just yesterday I had a block of text messages delivered all at once that had actually been sent about 12 hours earlier. Kinda disconcerting until I realized what had happened.
By the way, I intentionally do not sync up my work, personal, and phone email accounts — they are all separate. I even have separate IM accounts for use on my phone.
