Cubicle Culture

CUBICLE CULTURE
By JARED SANDBERG
Wall Street Journal

Workaholics Use Fibs, Subterfuge to Stay Connected on Vacation August 25, 2004

You never would have guessed Jodi Burack was vacationing last week in South Carolina. When she received an e-mail from me last Friday asking if she was doing work during her time off, she responded within 10 minutes.

"Well, there was an outage of service," she pecked back on her BlackBerry. "I was nuts calling my office too much." But then the service was finally restored, and she was barraged with more than 200 e-mails, "My husband was playing golf. Did not catch me but we are with friends and they grabbed the pager away," she typed.

The attitude of family and friends forces Mrs. Burack to do what any self-respecting nonrelaxer must do: deceive, beguile and swindle. Last March in Hawaii, for example, her husband expressed shock that she hadn't brought her BlackBerry. But "I had it," she admits. "I was hiding it." She used it when everyone else was asleep, and if they weren't, she would sneak into the bathroom or the closet. The closet? "Oh, yeah, that's nothing," she says.

Some people just can't take a real break from work. Harboring an abiding certitude that something tragic will happen when they aren't looking -- including possibly to them -- they spend great sums and drive great distances dowsing for a few bars of cellular signal or BlackBerry link. Loved ones, though, rarely understand that the very possibility of missing something big at the office is more tragic than spending hard-earned money to effectively set up a satellite office beachside. That forces the helplessly connected to abandon all semblance of dignity just to get their fix. It's another sign of how much work can contaminate leisure.

Workaholism is nothing new, particularly in a nation founded by people who distrusted idleness. "Everybody who's observed American culture, beginning with de Tocqueville, has said that Americans are uneasy with leisure," says Geoffrey Godbey, a professor of leisure studies at Pennsylvania State University. The difference is that now people have a way to calm themselves when a vacation is packed with too much fun: "New technologies make it easier [to channel] those impulses," the professor says.

In June, Bryson Koehler, a director of Internet services at a hotel company, went with his extended family to Hilton Head, S.C., where he discovered that only in one corner of his parents' bathroom would his BlackBerry and wireless laptop connection work. So he camped out in the loo, even after his mother, unaware he was sitting there in the dark one evening, began to undress for bed. "Whoa, Mom. Wait, I'm back here," he shouted.

When his family went biking on island trails, Mr. Koehler surreptitiously planted his laptop, cellphone and BlackBerry in the bicycle trailer carrying his 9-month-old son, leaving them with their power on to collect messages during the ride. It worked until his wife caught him. "She accused me of giving the baby cancer because I had the cellphone under him," Mr. Koehler recalls.

The persistence of his connectedness "gets on my wife's every last nerve," Mr. Koehler concedes. As a result, she'll "accidentally" unplug his BlackBerry from its charger, "accidentally" switch it from ring to vibrate, or just hide the thing. Her newest tactic is to book cruise vacations, where Internet access is exorbitantly expensive.

A vast ocean didn't stop Juliette Anthony, a legislative consultant for a solar energy company in California, who went on a cruise in February with a friend. She fibbed to her friend, who worried she didn't know how to relax. "I'd say, 'I'm going to the gym' or 'I'm going to get a massage,' " she says. Instead, she would be in the ship's bar, drinking ginger ales and racking up Internet-access charges.

For his transgressions, Jeffrey Cohen, a sales director at insurance information provider Advisen, gets the "evil stare" from his wife, as well as such comments as, "Oh, nice of you to join us," he says. If he needs a pen or paper and asks for it, no one will fetch it for him. At the same time, his twins mock him in unison, pretending they're typing on a handheld.

Workaholic Henry Franceschini took his first vacation in four years last Easter, but the 48-year-old sales manager soon discovered there wasn't much cellular service in Destin, Fla. So he spent a lot of his time driving in search of a signal.

Altogether, Mr. Franceschini probably spent as much as four hours each day working. He'd tell his family he was using the Internet to find a great restaurant for dinner but would answer e-mail instead. He'd say he was going to the bathroom but call the office. He'd say he was going to the grocery store but phone work instead.

Because he's tired, he vows to reform, sort of. "I won't take the laptop but I will take the cellphone," he says. He plans to use his 371,000 frequent-flyer miles to go anywhere in the world, so long as it isn't to the Caribbean. "There's no cellphone coverage" there, he exaggerates.

There's another solution: try to persuade family members you don't have any choice about working. Failing that, you should just hope your kids turn into normal teenagers. "When they're teenagers, you're invisible anyway," says Jeff Porter, a Dallas attorney.