Until a short time ago, I worked in a little office in a suburb that, compared to others around it, could be characterized as lively. I rented it because my house was so quiet I could hear myself think, which is, frankly, a disturbing sound, and I hoped a certain level of buzz would make me more efficient.

For a while, it worked. In an office I felt part of the real world, even though I was at the end of a long hallway and the only people who came down had usually taken a wrong turn looking for the exit or the bathroom. But there were also distractions--some imposed, some embraced--and there were days I got little done but wage a half-indulgent and half-necessary battle against an email backlog.

One day, an attractive woman appeared at my door. "Oh, hello," she said warmly. "And what do you do?"

It was like the beginning of a fantasy. I always believed that if you are a responsible, reasonably dull person, a fantasy must come true eventually, and you will spend months, with occasional discomfiting reminders years later, regretting it.

In this case, fantasy remained at the door's threshold. The woman was selling phone service. She asked for just a minute of my time, by which she meant twenty. I interrupted her spiel many times. "Listen, I really have to get back to work," I'd say, and she'd smile sweetly and keep going.

I had never experienced a real door-to-door salesman before. I thought they were figments of a quaint past, like milkmen. There was something ironic about the fact that almost everyone sells things by phone, except the person who sold phone service, who came in person.

A room of my own

Indeed, the only strange thing about that particular marketing call was that the voice had a body attached to it. Five times every day, like a muezzin's call to prayer, a marketer calls. "Is this the owner of the business?" they begin, or, "Can I speak to the person who is in charge of buying advertising?" If they have my name, they invariably mispronounce it.

Most of what consumes my time doesn't get me through my to-do list. A goodly amount of time is spent just staying above water. A mail-in rebate, which I factored into the purchase price, adds a few steps, and this after I lost time researching Consumer Reports and online sources to make sure I got the right thing for the price. The credit card has a charge I don't recognize; and an electric company that just came into my de-regulated region wants to save me 15%, guaranteed, except I want to switch back because it turns out it costs more, and there are steps to make them make good on the guarantee. My gutters need to be cleaned, but the guy who did them fell off his ladder, and I have an appointment at the dentist, who keeps me waiting. I get back to the office with a tired jaw and a ringing phone.

"Can I speak to the person in charge of placing advertising?"

Every interruption is a step down the path to the land of wasted time and mis-spent energy.

Sometimes, I confess, I'm a willing accomplice. When I was in a corporate setting, I didn't get marketing calls at the office. We had office managers for that. But early on I let myself get hooked by the office gossip monger, and then, knowing how mean she could be, I listened politely in order not to upset her and become one of her subjects.

It's not just other people. When work becomes a struggle, I grasp for distractions. I clean. I file. I schmooze clients or call up friends and family to chew the fat. With marketers, I'll walk through all the permutations of what a change in this thing or that would really mean. I get on email, and when nothing's of interest, I check sports boxscores and see where I am in the standings of my fantasy baseball league. Once I've given the stats a good going-over, I check to see if any email messages have arrived. This, by the way, is exactly what Virginia Wolfe meant when she said everyone needs a room of their own. After all that time well spent, I go downstairs for coffee.

People regard me as a highly motivated individual. The scary thing is, I have seen the way other people work, too, and compared to them, I probably am.

The jingo of wasting time

People talk about "time deficits." It's a gimmicky phrase in an age of jargon and self-serving notions of how stressful modern life is. When was it, exactly, that life wasn't stressful? We have no war, cold or hot, and an economy whose engineers are most worried about too-rapid growth and deflation. Granted, these good times aren't good for everyone, but if you go by the numbers, they've never been this good for as many--and my guess is, they're the ones who complain the most.

There's not enough to worry about. It's very stressful, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

We "multi-task." Sometimes this means doing many things at once. Often it means lacking any focus. Either way, without a commitment to one thing, we are pulled in different directions, overwhelmed by a multitude of responsibilities. It becomes impossible to remain satisfied for more than a moment before moving on to the next item on the list. There is no point at which you can sit back and say, "Ahhh, finished."

One of the results of automation, observed an economist friend of mine who studies these things, is that we have freed our hands to spend all our time on mind work. "We're all tormented artists measured by our creative output," he says. "It's hard to be creative eight hours a day."

Maybe in reality we have too much time and lack talent for filling it. And, of course, when we aren't blowing time on our own, there are other people who will blow it for us.

My fantasy: the sequel

I tried to tell my phone-service sales person that I wasn't interested. She said I ought to just try it out. There was something pleading in her voice, almost as though because I'd let her say her spiel, I was obliged to give her a chance. As if I'd taken her time.

And I would have given her a shot, but others before her blew my trust with their misrepresentations. I know that once they close the deal, I can forget the line, "If you have any problems, just get in touch with me." Their ability to reach me is matched by their ability to prevent me from reaching them in a moment of need. And that, despite experience, I'm still going to try, and it's going to cost me more time.

I tried to give her a hint. "No," I said. "It doesn't work for me." She told me I had nice eyes and looked intelligent.

She came back the next day with a colleague. They were the marketing equivalent of good cop/bad cop. He kept telling me what a deal I was getting, as though I'd be a fool to pass it up, while she hung back and said, "It's good that you ask questions. That's why you're so successful at what you do."

I think they felt close to nabbing me until I showed them that their product cost more, unless I took an additional suite of services. In that case, I would save about 37 cents a month and have the option of not using things I didn't need.

The next day she phoned: "Can I come by for five minutes tomorrow?"

"No!" I said. "I'm sorry, but I'm honestly not interested. Listen, it has to be costing you more calling me and coming over than what you could possibly make on this deal."

"I don't mind."

It was like a satire of the movie "Fatal Attraction." "Fatal Distraction," I'd call it. I considered locking the door and ignoring any knockers but was sure I'd miss Federal Express deliveries. Suddenly, being "in the world" wasn't so wonderful. I started to have thoughts of moving home.

Eventually she went away and didn't come back, but in the first few days, I continued to expect her, and hardly worked. Waiting for her knock on the door, I checked my email and the standings in my fantasy baseball league, and then, feeling stressed by the multitude of tasks I wasn't getting done, I went downstairs for a coffee.

TODD PITOCK recently moved his office back home, where he no longer fantasizes about women selling discounted long distance phone service. He last wrote for Juggle about conflict.