A Brief Musing RE: Desk Phones

    While reading the Orlando Sentinel article on the AT&T outage, there was something that stuck out to me - that the author's wife was issued a landline phone for work. 

    When I started with the State, my cubicle came equipped with a desk phone. Sure, I had an assigned cell phone, but when your job involves meeting, interacting with, and possibly upsetting lots of people, you don't really hand that number out. Enter the desk phone. Before we signed our telework agreements, it was checked twice a day - once in the morning, and once in the afternoon. And before COVID, it was the only phone number on my business cards. If you called me after 4:00, you'd have to wait until the next day. Instead of having the tempo constantly interrupted by phone calls (and now, Teams calls or messages with smartphones) that should probably be emails, I was able to focus on what needed to be done. My cell phone was reserved for urgent / important matters, and I controlled who had access to me through it.

    For what I was doing then, it worked. That landline helped control and slow the pace of a job that could get overwhelming very quickly. As weird as it may sound, it helped me maintain agency and taught me prioritization - after all, there is no "visual voicemail" or talk-to-text for a "dumb" phone. As work culture has shifted post-COVID, desk phones have shifted with the State from a mandatory issued item to a requested item. And, in an effort to keep myself out of the office as much as possible with the pushback against telework, I have an incentive not to give an excuse for me to go in every day. 

    Would I rely solely on a desk phone for my law practice? Absolutely not. Would I make sure every member of the team had one to help compartmentalize their work and insulate them against outages? Absolutely.

    Attached: A candid photo of my morning ritual circa 2018, probably taking in an anonymous complaint.