So, we're down to driving the car about twice a month now on average. Usually it's me taking the car out to meet with a friend for lunch once a month upstate, or the occasional need to fetch her highness Frisket from Monstermutt.

Still, I take the car in regularly and try to keep it clean and in shape. And we tend to drive it more in the summer than the rest of the year. So today is the one day a quarter I spend a morning (and likely much of the afternoon) somewhere in Queens.

I'm not quite sure where I am, I take the BQE north to Northern Boulevard, drive west a bit, and drop the car off at Paragon. About two visits ago I discovered a Starbucks had opened about six blocks west on Northern. Now, I hate coffee, but I love WiFi, so I'm spending the time in a Starbucks.

I've never been one of the working-in-Starbucks crowd, probably because of the intense dislike for coffee (you want to see a horror face: give me a sip of your coffee). It's an interesting mix of people: some reading books, newspapers, others tapping away at laptops. One guy, an obvious regular since I saw him the last time I was here in December, has a whole corner locked up: laptop, phone out, headphones on and bluetooth headset at the ready.

Another table was taken up by a pair of men. It became apparent that it was a new manager and an employee and they were talking through some issues. I can't tell how it went, there was some raised voices but they did seem to leave amicably.

The downside of sitting in a Starbucks: I feel a guilty need to buy something, so there's a collection of Jones Soda Co. Root Beer on my little table.

There was a stretch of time at IBM where the idea of sitting at a cafe, whiling away the time while working wirelessly seemed like a great idea. Doonesbury even ran a series of strips where Mike Doonesbury works away in Paris, sitting at cafes all day.

I never really got to try that out at IBM, and now that it's pervasive, I wonder how good it is to do this regularly.

I mean, there are moments where I miss working in an office, but as I wrote in my post on sabbaticals, the office I keep looking back to is the one I had when I first joined IBM: show up no later than 8:12 (my hiring manager said that that 12 minutes was for commuting, and that you actually were considered to be in the office at 8:00). Log in, check your email, and then jaunt down to the company cafeteria for the morning bagel and diet Coke.

Return, work for a bit, then back to the cafeteria for lunch.

The afternoon was the longest stretch of work, though there was usually time for another jaunt to the cafeteria. You also always had one or two people doing the rounds, gossiping mostly, sometimes touching base. We had one coworker who was called The Deal, who made a regular stop at our office between 2:00 and 2:15. He'd dish out the goss, but also pass along useful bits of status on projects that we weren't directly involved in but still found useful in our work.

Communicating.

All of these moments, as wasteful as they appear to my post-costcutting, post-layoffs eyes, brought people together to communicate. Certainly much of the communication had nothing to do with what we were doing for the company, but a good chunk of it did. We exchanged ideas, tidbits, knowledge learned on the job. Have an acronym you can't decipher? Just type WHATIS at a CMS prompt. It's how I learned to move from being a student to an employee, working to a schedule, deadlines, how to communicate with coworkers.

And I know that that world is long lost, both within IBM and outside.

We're all very optimized now, trying to squeeze as much out of each moment of time to do work. But I wonder what we've lost, working on our own in the cafes, Starbucks, etc. We seem to have gained time, but we've lost the interpersonal connections we had.

You can argue that we've got I/M, email, Skype, newsgroups, mailing lists, blogs, feed aggregators: yes, truly we have more ways to keep in touch, communicate, that ever before. But we're more often that not communicating very precise information. What time the meeting is, the answer to your question (No, you can't have that domain name.).

And what a torrent of information that is. You can't unplug because you'll fall behind, so you check email on your phone, at public workstations. You check the blogs (the biggest sinkhole of my time since I discovered FORAVIEW many years ago).

But are we learning anything? I feel, and this is wistful hindsight I'm sure, I feel I learned far more in those moments of talking to the people I worked with than in the months if not years I've spent reading and absorbing information online. It's not that I feel I waste time reading stuff online, but the information is so dispersed, it's not concentrated, I have no personal connection to know whether or not this tidbit of advice is truly valuable.

You read about people giving up blogging. It's typically so-called A-list bloggers that call attention to themselves by announcing that they are giving up blogging. I wonder if it's because they feel they spend too much time reading, or too much time writing.

We've adopted all of this new technology, but we have yet to learn how to use it efficiently. I've been writing HTML for over ten years by hand most of that time. The last project I was involved in as an Information Developer at IBM was to develop a WYSIWYG editor for our shift to SGML from Bookmaster. That was in 1993. Now, while you can sort of do WYSIWYG editing of HTML, it's with specific platforms or tools. I'm typing this in a web form for MovableType, and entering various tags etc. by hand. I've used (alleged) WYSIWYG tools for blogging, and always find that I need just one specific tag that the tool doesn't support. And not only does it not support it, if I enter it by hand the tool strips it out when I return to WYSIWYG mode.

We keep building these silos, silos of applications, silos of information.

Part of the whole Web 2.0 meme is mash-ups, taking bits of applications and data and mashing them together. Sometimes, as with Google's Maps, the application owners support this explicitly. Other times, as with the housing maps based off Craigslist, there isn't explicit support, but the data is there to be used as you see fit. And still other application and data providers lock everything away. They prefer the customer they can squeeze over the potential customers they may gain by opening up.

With good reason: if you give stuff away for free how can you make money? Forget even profit motive, how do you pay the bills? A long time ago I was looking for an internship as part of my technical writing program. One of the potential places was a well known free software advocacy organization. They needed someone to write or update the user manual for one of their projects. In retrospect, it was silly to think I could just walk in and do the work, but I applied anyway.

And pretty much had the job if I wanted it. Only catch: no pay. No pay, no salary, no benefits, no stipend to cover the cost of living in Boston.

With a zillion dollars in student loans hanging around my neck I couldn't take the job (is it a job if you're not getting paid?).

So, instead I took the positon at IBM. My job was to create a booklet of commands for RACF. Seemed simple enough, I had three months to do it and had completed much of the work in the first six weeks.

Which was good, I didn't feel as guilty skipping out with the afternoon movie crowd, or spending as much time on the long lunches at the Poughkeepsie Galleria.

And it was good as well because three months in, one of the lead writiers on the product became gravely ill, and suddenly I was responsible for an entire book (I know these days individual writers get tasked with entire libraries in the refined, streamlined processes of 21^st century writing).

And it was at that moment that being able to talk to people face to face mattered. I don't know that the same situation could occur today, but if it did I'm not sure how successful I would have been if I had to rely entirely on email, I/M, Skype, etc. to communicate with people. I am sure I would have learned much of the information: after all I used email and I/M (so to speak) at IBM. But the face-to-face communications adds something to the mix Something I can't put my finger on, but it makes the education richer.

I read somewhere, once, that we learn by doing, we learn by repetition. And I wonder if our brains (or perhaps just mine) isn't wired yet to learn by doing on line. And certainly I try to avoid repetition while reading stuff online. I've read it, I don't need to read it again. But you don't say that when someone tells the story of the APAR from hell for the fourth time, because you notice, even subliminally, that the story is a bit different each time. Not that the previous times were false, but each time the tale is told there's a different audience. This time there's a developer that was involved with the diagnosis, that time a manager who had to make the call on where to invest the limited people resources she had to solve the problem.

You learn through the repetition, because it's not repetition: the story gains new facts and information, and because you've heard parts of the story before you can sort of elide out the stuff you know and focus on what you hadn't heard before.

You do this automatically, you don't consciously think about it. If anything you think: My god, he's going to tell that stupid story about the Deep Blue vs. Kasparov web site again!.

And it's these interactions we miss when we don't work together. If you're not working together, physically together, you don't get a snack, you don't do lunch, you don't comment on the weather. When I was a kid it seemed like a running joke that people would ask about the weather. But as I've become embedded in an online world, working across an international mega-organization like IBM, it became a way to get a sense of presence. How is the weather there? I'd ask at the start of a conference call with Sydney, Madrid, Vienna, Portsmouth. It was different each time, but it gave a way of opening the door a bit, softening the discussion that was to follow (since if I was calling you more likely than not I was going to tell you something you didn't want to know).

There's a term for this chit-chat which I learned many years ago and forgot probably just as soon. I even picked up a book of rhetorical terms in the hopes of finding it again but it wasn't listed.

We need meta-discourse to fill out the holes, we need it to learn and absorb facts and information. Too much of what we're developing in information technology strips out the meta-discourse, or provides no room for it in the first place.

I'm working on a couple of projects which I hope will do a little bit to address this. Too much gets lost when we optimize the hell out of our every day lives, to make it easier to work remotely, to work at Starbucks. What used to seem freeing may instead be the path to being ever-chained to our electronic devices.

I resisted getting a pager for a long time, partly because I didn't think I was getting paid to be on-call (I wasn't, never really was). But eventually it became necessary, cell phones were expensive and range was limited, pagers cost less and were effective at communicating very precise bits of information: someone with this number has called you. I don't remember the circumstances, but when I got the pager a friend commented to me: Welcome to the leashed life.

Too often, the technology we adopt has become exactly that: a leash. Not an enabler, a restriction or constriction.

And while it's been fun sitting here at the Starbucks, watching the interaction between employees and customers, listening in on the various discussions, I'm still waiting for the stupid EGR valve to be replaced (and no, I'm not defining that, I know as much about the engine in the MDX as I do about sub-atomic physics).

If you're developing technology, and you've read this far, tell me this: are you developing the next leash or the next water cooler? I think we need more water coolers, more The Deals wandering the virtual hallways, and less leashes.