employablog

If you’ve ever watched a show like the West Wing, ER, 24 … or really any television drama, you are familiar with the moment in the story when a group of characters is gathered around for a moment of repose when someone’s cell phone draws them out of the conversation. We don’t notice much, until a second character’s pager starts beeping. Soon, the others are frantically reaching for their phones as some ominous low strings signal the impending notification of disaster.

Cut to commercial.

This moment has been replicated in my working life twice since I began this job. The first time, I was in a project meeting when one of my coworker’s Blackberry pulsed. He looked down, stifled a gasp and smiled. Suddenly, a flurry of IM’s popped across the project manager’s computer. On the speakerphone, the client’s phone rang and he began to sound distracted. Google had bought YouTube for $1.65B in stock.

When I walked out of the meeting the office was abuzz, as everyone simultaneously rushed to incorporate the deal’s implications into what they were working on even as they debated how close the terms were to what they had privately been guessing.

Yesterday, a similar thing happened. Apple’s iPhone was announced with fanfare, and the office was acting as if dispatch had just called in a multi-car-pileup-due-to-cattle-car-derailment, with multiple casualties inbound! IM was abandoned for shouting over cube walls: “It’s GSM! No 3G!” … “RIM stocks are tanking!” … “It’s multi-year exclusive” … “Get an image in that deck!”

During the YouTube acquisition, I was just an observer. Not this time. This time I was furiously hitting re-fresh on the tech blogs, researching obscure equipment manufacturers, trademarks and patents all while reworking an assumptions page for our project. It felt exciting, it felt important. It felt real.

Two hours later it felt underwhelming. There was no exciting music, there were no life-changing decisions, and, most importantly, rather than being well into the triviality of the Late Show we were still at the office working on presentations.

Either I need a more exciting career or I need to stop forming life expectations from hour-long television dramas.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 2:43 pm and is filed under Cubeland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.