By: PrimeCB
Ellen Muraskin is a senior writer at Comunicano PR.
She’s been writing on telecom and IT topics since the early 1990s, and worked at several magazines including Electronic Design and Computer Telephony Magazine.
Ellen shares her thoughts about working in her “virtual office,” where there’s an age difference between her and most of her co-workers.
When I joined Comunicano PR two years ago, I quickly and happily settled into my role as one of the senior writers and technical village elder.
It’s a complicated industry, full of cryptic abbreviations and layers of tech that have been confounding reporters and marketers alike for many years. So my greatest kick around here is helping out (and winning the undying gratitude of) the twenty-somethings who need to know (and don’t want to bother the boss) about who competes with who, or what works with what, or doesn’t, and why.
These hard-working young women will give me a long list of conference speaker topics, and another long list of clients, and ask me to help match A to B.
They then jump on their virtual pile of conference and award applications, getting clients highly prized opportunities to address key audiences with market trends and product introductions or to be bestowed a “best of….” title.
Their thank-yous are profuse and, I think, heartfelt, even though this is my job just as much as winning spots and awards for clients and coordination is theirs.
Because my “village” is virtual – we all work from widely scattered zip codes, passing work products from hand to hand over broadband — I have all the advantages of experience with none of the drawbacks of age.
I’m not the only grey eminence. Telecom’s dot-bomb years ago let loose quite a few highly placed people from major industry players, several of whom now work with media from the other side of the fence. But I’m the one who most likes to teach, and perhaps the one who the young feel safest asking.
With slightly less-junior staff, on conference calls with clients, I send simultaneous interpretation through instant messaging whenever terms or acronyms are used that I suspect they don’t know. They send back appreciative emoticons. This makes me feel… let’s say, venerated.
Then there are those rare occasions, at conferences that Comunicano writing staff attend, when we are physically together. On those days I surely I feel the earth’s gravitational pull return, firmly and not-too-gently reminded, by their high-heels, their smooth skin, their energy and their quick texting thumbs, that they’re the same age as my eldest daughter.
Then I can only marvel in the press room at how they multiplex inputs and outputs, craning their necks into smartphones while they pull briefing pages out of their laptops, ID editors and reporters from a page of mug-shot jpegs, introduce clients to analysts and change flights, seemingly all at once.
Of course I pack a laptop too. And I might have four programs open at once. But my mobile phone is dumb. Like my phone, I tend to do one thing at a time – at most, two. (This means I can chew gum while watching and listening to Powerpoint presentations.)