One new developer at Socialtext recommended Skype, and suddenly 9 people were Skyping. At the same time, I opened the box on my cute little Plantronics headset phone for the landline.
Skype is two parts good — free, excellent voice quality when it works — and one part annoying — “are you there, are you there.” Suddenly, I can talk on the phone from the local wireless cafes (the cell was unbearable with the background noise). It’s fun being a small part of a network adoption trend — watching a technology adopted, one group at a time.
And I live in a tangle of headphone cords. I almost never have the right headphone on, or near to hand. “Wait, let me get that headphone…” (trips across home office). The headphone cords have an unnatural fondness for each other, the phone cord, and the laptop power cord. I impersonate the fates, weaving and unweaving the destiny of the world, except unravelling and untangling the headset cords. When everything is untangled, I think the world will end.
*The landline is wired — I gave up on cordless after years of phones that didn’t quite work, with battery life that didn’t support working with a distributed team.