Bad Blackberry manners can be costly

MOBILE email has become so distracting for some workers it could be costing their employers money.

Users are paying more attention to their Blackberries, iPhones and other gadgets rather than meetings and conversations – and businesses are complaining it upsets workplaces, wastes time and costs money.

"It happens all the time, and it's definitely getting worse," said Jane Wesman, a public relations executive and author of Dive Right In - The Sharks Won't Bite.

"It's become an addiction," she said.

According to a recent poll by employment website Yahoo! HotJobs, one third of more than 5000 respondents said they often check their emails during meetings. Such habits have their price, said the website's senior managing editor Tom Musbach.

"Things like BlackBerries fragment our attention span, and that can lead to lost productivity and wasted dollars because people aren't focused on their work, absolutely," he said.

Multi-failing

But the constant pursuit of an email fix may be costly. Research shows such multi-tasking can take more time and result in more errors than does focusing on a single task at a time.

"We know that if you have a person attending to different things at the same time, they're not going to retain as much information as they would if they attended to that one thing," said Nathan Bowling, an expert in workplace psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio.

"If you're attending to multiple things at the same time, you often times don't learn anything," he said.

People who text message when they should be doing something else are engaging in what Mr Bowling called counter-productive work behaviour, which also includes harassment, showing up late or playing endlessly on the internet.

"Technology allows us to do counter-productive things that we weren't able to do 10, 20 or even five years ago," he said.

Business etiquette coach Barbara Pachter said there is a "learning curve" to new technology such as BlackBerries.

"We're still at that point where we're being rude," she said, adding that user behaviour is likely to improve in the next few years.

Digital Television Transition

Digital Television Transition

Television

In October of 2005, Congress enacted the Digital Television and Public Safety Act of 2005. The bill established that, by February 17th, 2009, all analog television broadcasts from full-power stations must cease and be replaced by digital transmissions. Why the switch? Moving to digital does two things: It allows broadcasters to send more data more efficiently - in addition to the show you are watching, you may get program and scheduling information on a pop-up screen, as well as higher-quality image and sound. Moving to digital also frees up the existing analog spectrum for other uses such as cellphone and public-safety radio transmissions.

That spectrum leads to another reason: cash. That older, analog spectrum was auctioned off by the government and went for nearly $20 billion.

On Jan. 26 the Senate passed a bill that would have postponed the switch to DTV to June, which was then defeated in the House. On Feb. 4, the House voted again to extend the transition to digital television by four months until June 12. President Obama signed the legislation that pushed back the deadline and allowed some stations to turn off their analog signals earlier.

The main question everyone has about the DTV transition is: What do I need to do about it? This part is simple: If you have cable or satellite, you don't have to do anything. If you get your TV signal from an antenna, you have to buy a digital converter box in order to continue to watch television. You only need the box, and possibly a new antenna - older antennas may not pick up UHF signals, which is what DTV uses. You do not need a new television, or a high-definition television (HDTV).

So, how does one get a converter box? This is slightly less simple. Converters are sold at many locations: online, at big-box retailers, possibly your local drug store. They cost $50 to $70. You have to buy separate converters for each TV you own.

So you may be wondering why you have to shell out $50 or more to upgrade your TV when you didn't ask for this conversion in the first place. That's why the government set up a voucher plan. The idea was that people who needed a converter could get up to two vouchers (one per converter), each valued at $40. That would make converter purchases nearly cost-free, or at least pretty inexpensive.

Then things got complicated. Originally, the vouchers had a 90-day expiration date and all had been sent out, and no money remained to fund any more. But on March 24, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced that the backlog for digital television converter box coupon requests had been cleared and that the government now had sufficient financing to send out more.

The F.C.C. said more than 4,000 people were available to answer the agency's phone number, 1-888-CALLFCC (1-888-225-5322), to help consumers who are confused about the switch.