Context Switching

Heat radiated from the minuscule disposable cup, burning my fingertips as I sat down at my desk with my oversugared tea. I glanced at the Cisco phone sitting under my monitor. It read 10:14.

I logged back into my laptops, the ThinkPad taking two attempts, then took a sip as I waited and watched the clock on the bottom-right of my screen.

The clock incremented.

I scratched a note on the pad of sticky notes before me then tabbed into Emacs, glancing at the header as I clicked open the link, which loaded as I hit tab to expand the entry's text.

My memory refreshed, I tabbed to my browser, knee jiggling as the site loaded with the speed of a Raspberry Pi on NyQuil. A change request form stumbled across the screen and had barely settled into place before I tore across it, cursing the twenty-nine thousand employees that built it and my own faulty memory, tabs blooming beside it before a flurry of C-ws and a click of the mouse burned the digital garden and sent the request to the approval board. I made note of its status on my list and moved to the next task.

The clock read 10:18.

The next link was dispatched with ten seconds of thought and a minute of drafting as cognitive pneumatics forced acres of hedges and caveats onto a one-sentence answer. The sticky note found another line scrawled across it before I posted the response and C-c C-t'd the task into nonexistence.

The clock read 10:20.

The next task was not a link. Instead, an incomprehensible summary sat above a confused email. Black kissed yellow and back to the browser I went, tearing pieces of the message off and stirring them into Claudemeal before pouring it into a bowl and sliding it in front of the LLM. Matrices devoured the words as I opened another five tabs, skimming documentation before a flicker in my periphery informed me that the command I had kicked off before making my tea had finished. I made a mental note of it and returned to my Claude tab, predictions and ideas flickering in my mind before the next set of tokens snuffed them out. I extracted the choicest tidbits and threw the Claudevo link into Emacs, then sipped my tea before turning to my other laptop.

The clock read 10:25.

Crimson slashed the darkness of the terminal and I sighed, reading the error message, tugging at my panzerkette, and wishing it was being pulled the other way. An up arrow, a return, and I swiveled back to my ThinkPad. A curse tumbled out with a sigh, and was followed by the scratch of under-inked metal on cheap paper.

The clock read 10:26.

A red "9+" hovered over the conjoined purple couple on my taskbar and I tabbed over to Teams with another note on the pad, finding seven notifications and five messages. The notifications disappeared as I clicked through the invitations to meetings not meant for me, but which filled my calendar nonetheless. Of the five messages left, three were irrelevant, one was amusing, and the last became another entry on my list. My response was met with an emoticon reaction and a response, and another garden of tabs bloomed as we messaged back and forth, filling the screen with ideas and objections that would vanish into the bit bucket after thirty days.

The phone rang and I ignored the next message as I picked it up and exchanged mutters and grunts before tucking the phone back into its cradle and yanking a headset over my ears and clicking into a conference call. I waited to be allowed past the beige rope, taking another sip of tea and slashing a line across the sticky note before righting its fellows where the headset cord had knocked them from their place in the 10-key arroyo.

The clock read 10:29.