The Townsend Report

When I took the SAT in high school, we were asked what career we planned to pursue. I said I wanted to be a doctor. Now, after over thirty years in international affairs and information technology, I am becoming more like a doctor after all. No, I'm not healing anyone and my medical knowledge is not immense. I'm just becoming more like a doctor in the way that nearly everyone I work with is behaving like a traditional doctor. First, we all have today's equivalent of a pager -- the smartphone. Can you resist the urge to check on important new text messages or emails during an elevator ride? At a stoplight? Has the urgency of all tasks increased in proportion to the speed of communications? It's no longer sufficient to make phone calls; now I have to make an appointment to make a phone call via email. I have close business associates who will send me appointments for calls rather than call me. We then go back and forth on the appointment to nail down