Mind your Busyness
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday July 25, 2015

I stood at the toy shop counter and waited.

If the stripling in charge sensed my presence, he didn’t acknowledge it. He was engrossed in his phone, thumbs strumming the screen. A pair of tiny headphones gummed his ears.

My outside wore an expression of polite resignation. On the inside, I was chafing with annoyance.

Finally, he glanced up. “Sorry,” he said. “Was updating our Facebook page.”

“Just the Lego please,” I replied. He bagged the box, swivelled the credit card machine towards me and calmly returned to swiping his phone.

“Thanks,” I said, trying to catch his downcast eye. But he was too busy multitasking to cope with another distraction.

I remember the days when multitasking meant eating breakfast while thinking about lunch. Or frying bacon and testing the smoke alarms at the same time. I grew up being told to tackle one job at a time. Those who scurried inefficiently from task to task were labelled as scatty or dappy, or a pain. Being able to give your steady and unwavering attention to one mission was a mark of superior intellect.

Back then, if the phone rang, I sat down to answer it. Everyone did. In the 80s, our home telephone ruled from its own settee. A friendship could free range only the length of its green twisty cord. While gossiping, I’d multitask by winding the phone cable around my fingertip until it throbbed and turned purple.

Now I feel sorry for my home phone, trapped by its own limitations. It was just a primitive tool for talking.

I’d old enough to recall when mobile phones came with long rubber antennaes and squishy buttons. I was a cadet reporter in a radio newsroom the day our first Motorola captivated the office. It may as well have been the Roswell alien. The entire staff crowded around it. We young ones jostled to get our first glimpse of this strange creature. It had a pale fleshy keypad, a tightly coiled, muscular cord and a metallic black body. The handset clung to a battery the size of a brick, only heavier. We cubs viewed that mobile phone with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. After ten hours of charging it gave us twenty minutes of talk time. I got a sore shoulder from lugging it around.

Worse, it made us contactable in the field.

“Where the blazes have you got to?” my news director, Murray, would shout down the Motorola. He’d pause long enough to drag deeply on his cigarette.

“It doesn’t take thirty-five minutes to get from the Supreme Court to Wellington Street, young lady!”

It did when we court reporters had nicked off for coffee. In 1989, the closest I came to multitasking was juggling the Motorola and Murray’s temper.

Now, no device can compete with the thrilling gadgetry of my shiny new iPhone. My brain scrambles to attend to its constant demands. Like Pavlov’s dog, I leap to answer the Ding! of every incoming email, the distracting trill announcing another text message. My typing stalls repeatedly as I remind myself to renew my driver’s licence, pay the overdue gas bill and put on a second load of washing. I am at my least efficient when multitasking.

After an hour of interruptions, I resolve to become single-minded. I ignore the unmade beds and the damp washing. I chain my phone to its charger and gag it with the mute function.

“Can’t do two things at once, hey Mum?” says eldest son, smirking. This from a boy who can’t concentrate on homework unless he’s funnelling tasteless music into his ears. I watch him at his laptop, headphones attached. He’s skipping from his essay on Genghis Khan to a music video while vetting every beep and flash of his phone. Never has any brain been asked to perform so many tasks for so little mental output.

My Mum can’t understand why we’re allowing our gadgets to shorten our attention spans.

I went with her to the phone shop to replace her ailing ten-year-old mobile.

“I just want something basic,” she told the shop assistant.

He steered us towards a wall of electronics.

“This one is popular with our older customers,” he said, pointing at the latest iPhone. “It has bigger buttons, larger fonts, assisted GPS, a great camera. You can even edit your videos.

“I just want a phone that phones,” she reiterated.

“Like this one?” I said helpfully, pointing at the most basic model I could see.

“That one does nothing except dial and text,” said the salesman with a shrug. “It’s a pet rock.”

“I had a pet rock once. I miss it,” I said defensively.

Overwhelmed by choice, we left the shop empty-handed and went to have coffee and cake instead. Call me callow, but that’s the kind of multitasking I’m good at.