If the UAE had banned work emails to staff after office hours like France has done, I would have still suffered a burnout.
Journalists or journos have a work-life balance that is completely off kilter because of the long hours they put in to get the news out to you, news that is not fake and which does not help incompetent people get elected to high office.
The real work of a journo however, never happens during regular office hours. Most of the work during the day is routine stuff such as calling up people, interviewing them at their workplace, which invariably is in an area of the town where trying to find a parking spot is like searching for a proverbial needle in a haystack, the straw that broke the camel’s back, as they say.
Or work such as searching for a PR contact who has suddenly vanished just when you need a company point of view to a corporate fiasco, or correcting the grammar of your contributor from outer space who speaks and writes Klingon, and checking the spelling or rewriting the ‘lede’, or to check where the heck is Transnistria (country which is part of Moldova, if you must know).
The real work actually starts when you are snoring on your couch having crashed on it after watching a mind-numbing soap opera about a large Indian family living under one roof and their evil machinations. (BTW, the economy was so bad in the US in the recent past, that kids who wished to escape from their suffocating parents are back again and living with them because they could not afford the rent).
And the message from your workplace does not come to you by email. The era of the email incidentally has passed long ago, like the fax, which some government departments in some advanced countries still use nowadays.
Give you stress
The only function of an email is to give you stress and there are tonnes of advice by sociologists online on how to have no emails in your inbox.
Instead of an email, a phone call wakes you just as things were going nicely and just as you were taking the huge pizza box from the delivery guy, in your dream. You know immediately who is calling as you have linked the Ride of the Valkyries ringtone to the person.
(Check out Wagner’s theme to the opera on YouTube and you will get the picture. In Norse mythology, a Valkyrie is one of a host of female figures who choose those who may die in battle and those who may live).
“There’s a fire in a residential tower near your area. Can you pop out and check it out?” says the voice on the phone.
God forbid if your Android smartphone battery dies while you were sleeping (which it does, unlike my BlackBerry that lasted for days), or worse, you yourself switched off the phone to grab a few blissful winks of sleep, and you will never hear the end of that stupid decision.
“You are a journalist, you do not have a life,” says the boss as you stammer and try to explain why the phone was switched off.
If the phone, email and all the intrusive social media were working fine, then you still have to answer to your wife.
“Where are you going at this time of the night?” she asks sleepily.
“There’s a fire in a high-rise,” you say.
“Go back to sleep,” she yawns.
“Say you have high BP and can’t handle such stress.”
There are tons of other jobs where people cannot switch off after hours, such as my maid.
“She has switched off her phone,” said my wife indignantly the other day.
“I will not give her the advance salary she wanted.”
Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/mahmood_saberi.
