Losing my Blackberry
On the Aeroflot flight to Moscow, somebody stole my Blackberry and my son's Nintendo DS. For my son, this was a major life tragedy; for me, a massive inconvenience. It wasn't a great way to start a vacation.Although I don't obsess about work during vacations, I like being able to delete unimportant messages and forward anything urgent to other people. It makes the transition back to work easier. I can be sure that there will be no surprises waiting for me, and I know I'll have a lot less in-box clutter to clean up. Not having the Blackberry meant I'd be worrying about work for the entire vacation. I was wrong. I hardly thought about work at all. The issues I had been stressing about became as distant as memories of high school (I didn't become a stud until I was 30). Only the day before I flew back to Mongolia did I start to think about work-related issues, but even then, it was difficult, like trying to remember something important when you're completely wasted.Everyone told me I was lucky to get a such a complete break from the office. But instead, I was alarmed. Not by the sea of unread emails waiting for me, but by the fact that I was able to stop thinking about work. If you love your job, for real, how could you stop thinking about it?When I got back, I had nearly 1,000 unread messages. There were a few unpleasant surprises, and it took me longer than usual to get back into the job. Pretty much as I expected. What I didn't expect is that every evening, and every weekend, the switch goes off again. I'll have to think about this.
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Blackberry
work
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