That Clicking Sound You Hear May Be the Sound of Someone Thinking

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That Clicking Sound You Hear May Be the Sound of Someone Thinking

1/11/2007

But the administrator didn’t. In fact, “Jim” looked like I must ordinarily look, with his laptop open all the time and his face in it, typing and clicking. I could see that, from the perspective of someone in a meeting not engaged with my laptop, that being so engaged can appear a little annoying to someone who isn’t also doing it. But, since I ordinarily multitask in such meetings, I also was able to notice that “Jim” was not missing anything. He chimed in with questions at the appropriate times and never missed a discussion cue.

So, I decided to sit beside “Jim” during the next interview. By doing so, I was able to occasionally glance over and see what he was doing – and he was in tune with the discussion. Sure, he was opening and responding, quickly, to e-mail messages of all sorts. But he was also engaging Wikipedia, Google News, Google Images, and a host of other Web services to enhance his perspective on the conversation.

While one candidate mentioned his pioneering achievements in environmental work using RFID tags, “Jim” was reading about RFID tags and then looking at some of the candidate’s published articles. During another candidate’s questioning, “Jim” was able to ask a penetrating question about his run for a city council office a decade earlier – an item that had not even appeared on the candidate’s resume or supporting materials.

When we were done for the day, I questioned “Jim” about this, noting that I sometimes take flak for such connectivity during meetings. I specifically asked him whether this was a problem for him when he was in meetings with his president and he said that it was not a problem because his university’s president also uses the Web as a part of his brain and is also constantly referencing it via his laptop.

We commiserated over the years we still had to wait before we could use Google and everything else as brain extensions without having to make noises on a laptop keyboard and concluded that the one thing that would make the behavior less annoying to others, short of no longer doing it, would be to find a way to make the CTRL key silent.

So, shortly I am going to get some sharp instruments and poke around inside my Dell Latitude X1 to see if I can make the CTRL key stop making noise; without making it stop working. If I succeed, then at least that clicking sound when I close a file or open an incoming e-mail message won’t send the signal to someone else that might make them suspect I am not paying attention: Because I am!

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"That Clicking Sound You Hear May Be the Sound of Someone Thinking," Campus Technology, 1/11/2007, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=45143

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