The bakery I was queuing at was the only shop at the small airport. Sandwiched—pun intended—right between the security check and an endless string of tiny gates. Despite the queue only counting six people, it extended into a narrow hallway, blocking other travelers’ paths to their respective takeoff locations.
The blonde lady in front of me was tall and slim, yet she inhabited quite a bit of space. A suitcase, a bag, a handbag—and she was in no hurry to move any of those things out of the way for other people. While I was tiptoeing from left to right and back to let people pass, I noticed she was on her phone.
It was a video call to a work colleague or perhaps her boss. He sat in front of a virtual background with a stern expression. The lady was wearing headphones with a cable, but she held her phone in a way that allowed her coworker to only see her face. The angle was slightly off, but that didn’t do their intense discussion any harm.
There had been a communication issue, and the lady was clearly flustered. “What do I tell them? Aren’t we supposed to not say anything? Do we say it was a mistake? I know you’re just helping. What would you do?” At one point, she moved the video call to the corner of her phone’s screen so she could scroll through emails in parallel, presumably to look for one of the conversations they were referencing.
The more I think about it, the more of a sight to behold it was. A woman on a work trip with an eclectic mix of business equipment and personal belongings, waiting for her turn at a busy store, on headphones, doing a video call about a sensitive matter, all the while browsing emails. It’s amazing how many things we can—or perhaps can’t—do at one time.
What puzzled me the most was her choice to do a video call instead of an audio-only one. For one, if you’re waiting in line, your gaze is bound to be drawn elsewhere from time to time. For another, I’m pretty sure I showed up once or twice in the background of her video feed. And since she was also looking for information on her phone, she wasn’t exactly focused on her colleague either. If the matter was important enough to warrant some face time, clearly an airport bakery queue was not the spot to do it. And if it wasn’t, nor sensitive enough to require complete privacy, audio would have done just fine.
I’m sure she had a reason, even if I don’t understand it. But it did make me think about FaceTime, aka video calling technology, vs. face time—actually looking someone in the face while speaking with them. Just because we now can fire up a video feed from anywhere does not always make it the correct choice. Nor should it become our default simply because we can afford it.
Spending time with someone through a screen cannot make you pay more than 100% of your attention. If anything, confining people to a little box on your phone makes them seem more “manageable,” almost like a task. It makes it easier to get distracted, yet it doesn’t have the mental comfort of separating by the senses the way an audio-only phone call does. Walking and talking, though not perfect either, is more sustainable than walking and watching.
For all the technology in the world, there’s still a difference between FaceTime and face time. Know when it’s time for which.
