Taking unsuccessful multi-taskers to task while sighing over spilt milk
Steph tells her how to get to us. Describes our new premises. You literally can’t miss it. It’s a brick Byzantine style building opposite the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital on the Adelaide Rd. Until it was de-consecrated more than a decade ago, it was the capital city’s oldest synagogue.
“Is she going to find us?” someone asked Steph as she put down the phone. The response was a head shake which turned out to be correct. The client made an energetic attempt to convince the Presbyterian Church just down the road that it was the Synagogue, but Presbyterians don’t convert that easily. By the time she was seated in our boardroom, half an hour of her time was gone, although she didn’t seem that pushed.
“I’m really sorry, Tracy,” she told me, “but I actually was able to do a few phone calls that were very important.”
“Terry,” I corrected. “Right, let’s make the best use of our time. Why’re you here?”
“My mother’s a huge fan of yours.”
I waited for the second shoe to fall.
“And my granny. My granny thinks you’re really great.”
She got distracted by her smartphone. After a second, she looked up at me with the wide-eyed, startled and accusatory gaze of someone who thinks it’s your conversational turn, rather than their conversational turn. I smiled at her and said nothing. She finished off what she was doing on the phone and told me about the small firm where she worked. She’d been there for two weeks, she said, as her phone rang.
She stuck it to her ear and made apologetic gestures while heading to the door, apparently intending to take the call on the landing. I drank coffee for five minutes.
After three the conversation outside stopped, but she didn’t immediately come back in, and when she did, she was looking at the phone in dismay. She held it out to me. On the screen was a tweet aimed at her which suggested she was too stupid to live and recommending she end it all.
“You’ve been in your job two weeks?” I prompted. The phone went off again. This time she told the caller she was in a meeting and would call them back.
“Sorry, Tracy.”
“Terry. You’ve been in your job two weeks?”
“I’m desperate with names,” she announced. It was clearly a source of simple pride to her.
“You’ve been in your job two weeks?”
Something flashed on the phone and her index finger rose, ready to type.
“Turn it off.”
“Sorry?”
“Turn it off. You’re paying a lot of money for this session. You can’t afford to waste that money.”
“I’m grand,” she said, typing. “I’m brilliant at multi-tasking.”
At which point she overturned the milk jug. I had never noticed, up to then, that our boardroom table is divided into multiple sections, which allowed the milk to pour onto the carpet in thin and varied streams. I left the room to get damp tea-towels while she wrote her emails. Order restored.
“You’ve been in the job two weeks?”
The phone went off again. I reached across, took it, turned it off and put it beside me. Her expression would have suited that Jacques-Louis David painting, The Rape of the Sabine Women.
“I can’t be out of contact,” she said. “Say if there was an emergency? No, seriously, I can’t. I’m a brilliant—” “Multi-tasker,” I finished.
“No, honestly, I have to have it on.”
I slid the phone across the table to her. It moved more slowly than I’d expected, I suspect because the table was still damp with spilt milk.
“I suppose I could turn it off for 10 minutes if you really want me to,” she said, like she was conceding Alsace and Lorraine. And reflexively turning it on again.
“Thirty minutes remain in your session.”
THE phone went off. As she headed for the door, she put a hand over the mouthpiece bit to hiss at me that this call was really important and she absolutely had to take it. I sat there, drinking coffee. The door opened and one of my colleagues entered the meeting room.
“First time I ever saw a client spend more time on the landing than in the meeting room,” he said.
“Clients are so interesting,” I said. “I think she thinks I’m Tracy Piggott.”
He looked at me with insulting disbelief. Never mind the age thing, I know damn all about horse racing.
“Your client picks holes in the plaster, that’s what I came in to tell you,” he said.
“How d’you mean?”
He mimed being on the phone while picking bits out of the wall with a bent index finger.
“For fecksake,” I said. “The plaster’s only there eight weeks.”
“Well, the wall now looks like someone took a very small ice-pick to it.”
The client came back into the room. My colleague ducked his head at her and headed past her in the doorway.
“Seeya, Tracy,” he said and I made a resolution to slice, dice and fry him later that day.
“You’re two weeks on the job?” I said. “In the job, I mean. In the job.”
She began to poke at the nail of her index finger with a pen. That’s our wall plaster you have in there, I thought.
“Two years,” she said, quite crossly. “I told you that.”
“All right,” I said equably. “What’s your job like?”
She looked at the screen of the phone as if it held the answer. Very busy, she said. At this point, Stephanie came in the door with a folded half A4 sheet. “Your next client is in reception and Eoghan is waiting to come into this room with his client.”
“I know, I know, we’re out of time,” the young woman said. “That’s fine. I’ve got so much out of this session, you wouldn’t believe. You might think I wouldn’t pick up your good advice, but I really am a multi- tasker.”
I watched her head out into the sunshine wondering how a bright young graduate could convince herself that she’d just had a productive meeting when the sum total of nothing had been achieved. Whoever invented the concept of multi-tasking is the spawn of Satan.
I’m thinking of writing a song for those deluding themselves that they’re successful multi-taskers, to help them kick their counterproductive habit. I’m going to call it One Thing at a Time, Sweet Jesus....
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