I moved to a new spot at work, it’s fabulous. I now have a window! This is a decidedly significant upgrade from the wall I used to stare at. I can see cars crossing the Bay Bridge and a big fat palm tree; all of this overlooking the Embarcadero and its wonderfully distracting activity and foot traffic.
My new seat also puts me in the main pod of the production team. I don’t have to warm up the huskies for the overland expedition from my remote outpost of a cubicle to talk to my coworkers anymore. The strange thing is, we still mainly talk through e-mail even though we all sit right next to each other. I just sent a “thanks” to someone five feet away, when in all measures of efficiency and basic social sense, I should have just turned my head and thanked them verbally.
It bothered me and I thought about it for a while—with lots of staring out the magnificent window—and came up with a brilliant justification. Face-to-face interaction is so precious now that it’s reserved for the really important things, stuff that requires immediate attention. Like, your hair’s on fire. Everything else, such as my thank you, can be relegated to the inbox for reaction later. If I had thanked him in person, I would be improperly elevating my thank you to the high priority space of hair fire! No, let’s not disrupt the momentum of our industrious locomotion.