I don’t know how I made it through my old jobs. Before the days of instant messaging, we had to fool around at work the real way. We had to mix Iced Tea into the water coolers. We had to take pictures of our bosses and throw darts at them. We had to take two hour lunches. We tried to push the filing off onto the new employees.
Then the internet came–specifically, instant messaging left the realm of the mainframe geek, and entered the world of the casual user. Gone were the days of:
>msg fd6864a Hi! How are you!
Enter the days of the telltale door closing and opening sounds. File transfers. Calling your brother on his phone to tell him to turn on his webcam.
In a way, it’s better. We all stay in the office now and get some work done. But is that a good thing?