We are more connected than ever before. Between the email, voice mail and BlackBerry or other PDA it is difficult to escape the endless stream of information from your work and personal life. It just seems to me we are heading to where there is no escaping work and like many of the other modern day work convenience maybe conference calls are getting too convenient.
Let’s face it, you can do a conference call from anywhere. Just like you can talk to people from anywhere, I don’t even want to know all the places that calls are done from, conference calls are as convenient as your next cell phone call. When cell phones first came out the conference call service industry would discourage people from using them on a cell phone because they introduced a lot of noise and the networks were such that a dropped call during the conference call was pretty much a certainty. So, naturally our customers would call us and complain about the conference call service because they were losing participants during the call of there was a lot of noise on the call. And inevitably when our operators would join the conference call we would identify the culprit and most times it was a participant on the conference call on a cell phone. Well that has certainly changed. Now most of the participants on a conference call are probably on a cell phone. With the cell phone networks improvement and better equipment you can join and participate on a conference call from anywhere you can get a cell phone signal. And that is just about anywhere.
And now that people can get you just about anywhere they can also get you just about anytime. People seem to expect that since you have a cell phone than I should be able to reach anytime, anywhere. So, before when you would schedule a conference call with Asia, for instance, the participants would schedule the conference call for a time that was good for all concerned, knowing that people needed to be in the office during normal work hours to conduct the call. But know it seems that people just assume you can get on a call anytime. My wife, for instance, is regularly asked to attend conference calls with other parts of the world at all hours of the night. The other night she had three conference calls from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm at night with Australia and Asia. They just don’t seem to think that there are any boundaries since you are always accessible.
So, what do you think? Are conference calls too convenient?