"We're sitting there having a conversation about intellectual property and how it relates to social media and potential piracy of the Internet," his new boss says. "He's facing me, and as we're talking, he keeps looking down at his iPhone. And then over to his right at his computer screen."
"Occasionally, his phone would make a sound, then he'd glance down. He'd start typing on his phone. Once he stopped typing, I asked, 'What are you doing?'
"And he says, 'Oh, I got a text message. Sorry.' We continued the conversation. A few minutes later, he's looking down again, then he looks at the computer screen, turns away from me to face the computer and starts typing. I am in midsentence."
The company owner felt like yelling, "What's wrong with you?" Instead, he decided to ignore the intern and got back to working on his own project.
A minute or two passed, and "I heard him say, 'OK, so you were saying,'" the owner says. "I just ignored him and kept working." The intern repeated his words: "So you were saying." The owner turned around and said, "Are you done?"
"With what?" the intern asked. "Whatever you're doing over there that seems to distract you from our conversation."
"Oh, I'm just used to multitasking. Sorry," the intern replied.
The owner continued: "Here is a kid I'm taking the time to teach. This is to educate him. I could be working on something else. His behaviour was obnoxious."
Ridiculous as this situation sounds, it serves as an important lesson. No matter how good you are at processing information, you simply cannot do two things at once with any degree of efficiency.
A central bottleneck exists in the brain that prevents you from doing two things at once. Returning to the story, I'd like to say something meaningful about the intern - how his attempts to socialise whilst working cost him the promotion - but this would be cruel and, in any case, the ill-disguised moral to this tale is already quite plain. Most grasp this concept in the extremity, but we've almost all fallen fowl of it to some level at some point. Besides being impossible and counter-productive, fiddling with social media and your phone during conversations is rude. Best play it safe, unless necessary for work, switch it off.
As the business owner explained to his intern his first hour on the job: "In a professional environment, it's never a good idea to ignore your clients, boss or anyone else when you're having a conversation. Doing so says your time is more valuable than their time."
