My happy place looks a lot like a shoe store

It’s snowing little pellets of snow outside, and for the first time in a week it’s cold enough in my room to turn the heater up. I’ve got a book to read and a response paper to write, and a stack of library books quickly coming due without my having reviewed them.

Think summery thoughts. Think summery thoughts.

Uh-oh

‘Infomania’ worse than marijuana, says the Beeb. Just reading that headline made me so nervous, my Restless Leg Syndrome started acting up. Apparently HP (as in Hewlett Packard) commissioned a study that reveals that people are getting addicted to email and text messaging, and that this addiction leads to a drop in IQ:

Researchers found 62% of people checked work messages at home or on holiday.

I wonder whether people using their work email address as their main address factors into that at all. If you asked me how often I check my school email, it would be an obscenely high number, since I channel all my email into that one. And Entourage checks it automatically for me every ten minutes.

More than half of the 1,100 respondents said they always responded to an email “immediately” or as soon as possible, with 21% admitting they would interrupt a meeting to do so.

This is sick. I’m terribly slow about answering emails. The fun part is getting them, not answering them.

But fear not! HP has a solution — as indeed they always do, whether your problem is not having the printer-scanner-coffee-maker to fit your project needs or a debilitating obsession with email.

The firm said new technology can help productivity, but users must learn to switch computers and phones off.

Say what? How are you supposed to “switch the computers and phones off” before you start being productive with the “new technology”? Or are the computers and phones not the new technology? In which case, what new technology is helping our productivity? Smart phones? Blackberries? Handheld tablet things? Wouldn’t those be making the problem worse?

Maybe we’re supposed to switch off the computers and phones and then get all our work done using nothing but the printer-scanner-coffee-maker.