Schools banned phones. Teens survived. Now employers figured out the same trick works at Dairy Queen.
The workplace is the new phoneless frontier. That's the frontier. Not automation. Not AI. Just taking a rectangle away from a 16-year-old who scoops ice cream.
Some boss said it allows them to hyper focus on the task at hand. The task at hand is mopping floors and restocking napkins. Hyper focus was previously reserved for landing planes and defusing bombs. Now it applies to remembering if someone ordered extra pickles.
Employers are drawing a hard line. The benefits can be profound. Profound used to mean discovering penicillin or splitting the atom. Now it means a teenager made it through a four-hour shift without watching a video of someone doing a dance.
This is what we've become. We need studies and news coverage to confirm that people work better when they're not staring at their phones. Revolutionary stuff. Next we'll learn that chefs cook better when they're not blindfolded.
The teens will be fine. They'll suffer through their shifts in silence. They'll clock out. They'll immediately check their phones to see what they missed. The answer is nothing. They missed nothing. Thirty-seven notifications about nothing.
But here's the part nobody wants to say out loud. The employers aren't wrong. Take away the phone and productivity doubles. Give it back and you get a generation who can't pour coffee without filming it. The real frontier isn't going phoneless. It's admitting we built an entire economy around people too distracted to do the job they're being paid for.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
Leave a Comment