When Roger Phelps hits the road for business, he often puts in 17-hour days.
So when he finally boards his flight, don’t look for him to be in touch.
“I let (people) know upfront I’m not going to be that connected,” says Phelps, promotional communications manager for Stihl, an outdoor power equipment company in Virginia Beach. “Don’t expect me to be winging an e-mail back to you at 32,000 feet. You get enough of me as it is.”
Nowadays, you can surf the Web and dash off an e-mail from a speeding train or airborne jet, as wireless service is increasingly available.
Last week, Alaska Airlines joined such carriers as Delta, Virgin America, American and AirTran in offering in-flight Wi-Fi, putting the service on six of its jets with plans to offer it fleetwide by the end of the year. Since March, Amtrak’s high-speed Acela trains from Washington, D.C., to Boston have provided wireless Internet access. Amtrak plans to add the service to routes in the Northwest and California in 2011.
But what many business travelers see as a perk, others consider a potential nuisance that threatens to take away one of the last remaining respites from work.
“I’ve heard different travelers already complaining that that used to be the one time they knew that they were safely unreachable by their bosses and colleagues and could actually … read a novel and enjoy themselves,” says Dalton Conley, dean for the social sciences at New York University and author of Elsewhere U.S.A., about the impact technology is having on American society. “So that’s now yet another little corner of our lives that’s been invaded and colonized by the new technology, and work.”
Feeling Pressure
Being able to communicate from nearly anywhere has its advantages, road warriors and workplace experts say.
Workers are no longer tethered to their desks. They’re able…