I emailed a young colleague a few days ago to ask about an upcoming project. We were supposed to have a meeting to discuss it this week, but I hadn’t received any confirmation.
It’s a delicate email to write. On the one hand, I’d like to get the project going as soon as possible. On the other hand, it’s August, and I’d like to be able to spend most of it at the beach with a drink in my hand, so I don’t want to be the one who instigates a summertime meeting no one really wants to have. But on the other other hand, I want to get credit for being “available anytime” — that’s how I put it — to get the project underway. That’s where the delicacy comes in: I want to appear to be eager and industrious without being either one.
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“Just wanted to check in on this,” I wrote, “and available anytime to hop on a call. But I know this is a crazy busy time for people so also happy to kick it past Labor Day. Your call entirely.”
Pretty much every word of that is a lie, as I’m sure you know. I am not “happy” to “hop” on a “call.” I’d rather just laze around for the rest of the summer. This is not a “crazy busy time” for anyone. It’s August, for heaven’s sake. But I don’t want to be the guy who gets blamed for holding up progress. Make no mistake: I want it to be pushed into next month. I just don’t want to be the guy who pushed it. My guess is that my colleagues, who are mostly in their late twenties, would jump at the chance to dawdle and procrastinate.
When the project manager responded immediately, it was clear I had failed spectacularly. “How about we put something on the books for Tuesday,” he said. “And if possible maybe you can send some material around Monday morning so we have something to respond to?”
This was the worst possible outcome. Not only did I have to get myself into a businesslike setting for a video call on a day I had already earmarked for an extremely early cocktail hour, but I also had to deliver a work product the day before. Tuesday wasn’t going to be a meeting. It was going to be my meeting. I cursed loudly and rudely into the air, shouted angry insults at my colleagues while alone in my house, and fumed about the joyless and dour generation that their cohort belongs to. Don’t they know how to read an email like that? I yelled. Don’t they see an invitation to shirk and delay when it’s right in front of them? Stomp, stomp: Kids today! All they want to do is work!
Faced with a failed gambit, I surrendered and dutifully prepared for the meeting. I postponed my Tuesday morning cocktail — well, I postponed my second Tuesday morning cocktail — and connected to the video call at the appointed time. Which was when I discovered that the five other members of the team were calling in from their respective vacation spots — some were at the beach, one was at a lake house, the other was clearly in some place like Santorini — because they had all selected the generic “office” background from their Microsoft Teams video call options. They all looked like they were industrious workaholics toiling away from the exact same location, while lazy old me was clearly on August vacation, and if you looked carefully at the corner of the screen, also having a Bloody Mary.
The meeting was short, and when I asked where everyone actually was I got a mini-lecture from the 20-year-olds (we all seem to get a lot of them, don’t we?) about the efficiency of remote work, about how there’s Wi-Fi everywhere, about how you can “get a lot done” working half-days from Shelter Island.
“So you’re all at work during your vacation?” I asked. They all nodded. “Then it’s not a vacation,” I said. “Except,” I continued, revealing my Bloody Mary from behind the notebook I was pretending to use, “for me.” And I took a healthy sip and pressed “LEAVE MEETING” and left my colleagues to reflect on this foundational truth: You are either at work or you are on vacation. You cannot be both.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.