BUSINESS travellers are never happier than when moaning about how, with smartphones and laptops, they are now always at the beck-and-call of the office. It is undoubtedly true that modern-day communications can be a tyrant. Yet there can often be something disingenuous about this lament. How many times have you been to dinner with someone who instinctively gazes at his BlackBerry every few minutes? This is not so much tyranny but habit. It might even be compulsion.
Gulliver is as guilty of this as the next man. Like far too many others, I check my smartphone for e-mails last thing before I go to bed and again first thing in the morning. The only time I absolutely insist on cutting myself off from the office is on holiday. Then it is my rule never to check in with work, in the knowledge that if something absolutely urgent comes up, my boss has my number. Despite a belief in my own indispensibility, she has yet to need it. But the reason why I came up with a concrete rule in the first place is because the compulsion to peek at my e-mail is so strong.
