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https://www.wsj.com/articles/secret-for-workplace-zen-landlines-and-ethernet-cords-remote-work-11648220628


BETH SACCA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
BETH SACCA FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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 * Life & Work
 * Work & Life


THEIR SECRET FOR WORKPLACE ZEN? LANDLINES AND ETHERNET CORDS


‘I’M SITTING DOWN AND I’M PLUGGING IN.’ WORKERS, SICK OF DROPPED CALLS AND
SPOTTY WI-FI, REVERT TO EARLY 2000S TECHNOLOGY.

By Rachel Feintzeig
March 28, 2022 12:01 am ET

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Armed with a slim laptop and a Wi-Fi hot spot, Bobbie Carlton used to work
everywhere—coffee shops, clients’ offices. The 56-year-old, who runs an online
speakers’ platform, felt like the archetype of the modern worker. “Cords are for
old people,” she explained.

Now 50 feet of Ethernet cable snakes through her 100-year-old house in
Lexington, Mass., climbing over doorways, running up the staircase, taped to the
floor of the upstairs hall. It’s seriously ugly, she acknowledges.

“Good God, this is, like, me in the ’80s,” she says.

And yet, she loves it. 




“I’m sitting down, and I’m plugging in,” she says.

Some hybrid and remote workers are embracing the joys of hardy old-school
technology, untangling wired headphones, unearthing cords from that box in the
back of the closet and rediscovering the delight of a ringing phone that is
tethered to the wall. Like Ms. Carlton, they’re sick of video feeds that sputter
and freeze as family members suck down bandwidth, or calls that drop into the
ether with no notice.

Bobbie Carlton's Ethernet Cable
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They would also like to safeguard themselves from, well, themselves. For all of
technology’s failings, we’re the ones insisting on dial-ins with 11-digit
passcodes for what could have been an email. We spend hours scrolling Instagram
when we should be finishing that PowerPoint. It’s hard to do that while holding
a landline phone to your ear. Maybe reverting to the stripped-down tech of yore
can help.

“It’s the equivalent of comfort food,” says Maya May, the on-air host of a
streaming show who’s based in Los Angeles. “Anything analog to me is the
equivalent of when things were safe and calm.” 

That’s why she recently began paying $12.99 a month to service a cordless
Panasonic phone she can cradle on her shoulder like old times. It rarely rings.
But the fact that her colleagues have the number has freed her to pop her
cellphone—with all its inherent distractions—into a drawer in her home office
for hours at a time without panicking about being unreachable.

Going backward can come with some hiccups. Adam Ozimek, an economist, thought
getting a landline would solve the spotty cell service in his Lancaster, Pa.,
house. One problem: In many areas, phone companies won’t sell you a traditional
landline anymore. Getting a landline often just means plugging into the
Internet.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

How have you perfected your remote work setup? Join the conversation below.

“I thought it was going to be like going from MP3s to vinyl, but it wasn’t. It
was like going from MP3s to worse MP3s,” Dr. Ozimek says of the sound quality.

Then came the spam calls. At all hours.

Dr. Ozimek knew, in his heart, that no one he wanted to talk to was ringing. And
yet.  

“That’s how we were raised. You run to answer the phone,” he says. “It’s like if
someone walks up to you and says hello and you were to just stare them in the
face and not respond.”

After a few months of nonstop ringing, he gave up and unplugged it.

If you, too, have been trying and failing to perfect your remote work setup,
take heart. 

“There are so many nuances to it that I feel bad for the modern end user,” says
Tom Hughes, who heads the service desk at Electric, an outsourcer of IT services
for businesses. He oversees 140 tech experts who have spent the past two years
fielding frantic messages from remote workers. 

Electric’s service desk tickets rose 64% to 4,100 a week this January from 2,500
last January as folks hunker down for long-term teleworking and try to make
their newfangled, wire-free setups sustainable, he says. 

By the second or third time someone calls complaining about their AirPods
inadvertently connecting to their spouse’s car, Mr. Hughes recommends wired
headphones.

“Latest and greatest bleeding-edge technology isn’t always for you,” he says.

Part of the problem is an inherent conflict of interest between the companies
making technology and the people using it, says Marc Weber, a curatorial
director at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, Calif.

“The companies want to give you something good enough that you’ll keep on buying
it, but they don’t really care about making your experience wonderful or easy,”
he says. “They want to force you away from older stuff.”

Many of us don’t actually want to move forward. Old technology takes us back to
a time when life was less complicated. We picked up the phone if we wanted to
talk to someone, switched on the television if we wanted to be entertained.

“I think a lot of the nostalgia that people might have is from just having fewer
choices,” Mr. Weber says.

Turns out, you can buy that too. 

THE FREEWRITE SMART TYPEWRITER

Photo: Astrohaus

That’s the idea behind Freewrite, a line of “distraction-free” writing tools
that give people full-size devices with as little on them as possible. The
brand’s four-pound aluminum typewriter is fitted with a small E Ink screen (the
same technology Kindles use) and not much else. It syncs to programs like Google
Drive so you can offload your words to your computer, editing or publishing from
there. But on the Freewrite, there’s no browser, no apps, no email to distract
you. You can’t even waste 15 minutes fiddling with fonts.

“They just really help people to focus because there’s nothing else you can do
on them,” says Adam Leeb, chief executive of Astrohaus, the Detroit startup that
makes them.

Ben Hong, a 33-year-old software engineer, likes to take notes while reading
books on his Kindle so he can fully absorb the information. Trouble is, he would
disappear down Reddit rabbit holes on his laptop as he came across interesting
tidbits and googled around to learn more. He recently bought a Freewrite so he
could focus.

While he recognizes the irony of buying more technology to try to solve his
problem of having too much technology in the first place, the device has helped
him connect with his thoughts and fully digest books on psychology and
self-improvement. Sitting at a coffee shop, the retro-inspired device splayed
out before him, he says, “I feel pretty hip.”

Write to Rachel Feintzeig at Rachel.Feintzeig@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8



Appeared in the March 28, 2022, print edition as 'Being Wired Has Its Comforts.'




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