The News-Flash Ding-a-Ling

(Updated to fix various typos.)

When I worked in radio 40 years ago, stations got news from the Associated Press (AP) and/or United Press International (UPI) over a teletype. It was all uppercase, and it was a learned skill — called “rip ‘n’ read” — to grab teletype copy just ahead of a newscast and read it a) without stumbling, especially over unfamiliar names and b) make it sound like you know what you were talking about.

When there was breaking news, the teletype would ring a series of bells — the more important the news (Armstrong walks on moon, e.g.), the greater the number of bells. Our ears were finely attuned to those bells, even though the teletype was invariably in another room behind a series of doors so listeners wouldn’t hear it clattering when you opened up the mic to talk. (And some of us did talk, in normal voices; I never did the screaming-over-the-record-intro DJ thing.¹)

Even at a relatively large regional station, there’d only be a couple of people around who had to keep an ear out for the ding-ding-ding that promised news someone thought important. And that was only in one business; in a market with, say, 20 radio stations, there might be only 30 people in the whole market who salivated when the bell rang.

Nowadays, entire office buildings full of people — tens of thousands of them — jump when the bell rings.

And it’s not even news anymore.

It’s conversations. Shared jokes. Requests. Solicitations. A few are important, but most are neither important nor urgent. Yet people jump when the EMail bell chimes.

Why?

Sure, once you set expectations you’re always ready to interrupt whatever you’re doing for incoming guided missives, it’s tricky to extricate yourself from these expectations. But you can do it. More importantly, when you enter a new environment, set expectations up front, either directly or via your actions, that you do not read or respond to EMail in “interrupt mode.”

There’s work, and there’s doing EMail, and they’re not the same thing.

So turn off the bell and flashing cursor. Close Outlook, or at least hide it behind another window. For sure turn off the blue ghost image — called a toast — that pops up at the lower right of your screen when an EMail arrives.

And ask not for whom the EMail bell tolls….

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¹By far the hardest thing such a DJ had to do — besides sound inane — was to talk up until the first word of the lyric was sung. Try it sometime; it’s much harder to do than you think. You have to know the record, have a feel for the beat and the music, and find stuff to say such that your last word is the conclusion of a full sentence. Nowadays I gather radio-station record — well, CD — releases actually print the intro time on the label; back then, you actually had to know the record. And if that sounds like an uphill-in-the-snow-both-ways plaint… well, I guess it is, young whippersnapper!