Oh God! I never thought I would say this – but i am admitting quite shamefacedly – I missed my emails!!

Cut to Thursday night. Post dinner and I am multitasking as usual. I am answering my emails, trying to convince my elder son to finish his homework, helping him with it and giving instructions to co-pilot to draft an agenda for me.

But all i am getting done is getting frustrated. My son is tired and whiny so I let him go to sleep. copilot has been acting super strangely and slow…. and I am wondering if I overburdened it with work. I search Google and AI mode tells me maybe indeed I am – I could clear cache, start a new chat, and so on and so forth. Nothing works. I restart my computer. Multiple times. NADA. So I think of reaching to IT next morning and decide to focus on my Inbox. And no new mail for the last 2 hours! Aha! It is my internet. I connect and disconnect my internet. Nopey Nope.

Oh well, tomorrow is a new day – might as well go to sleep.

In the morning I wake up to the alarming message from my organisation – “Microsoft email and other services remain unavailable or degraded!” Panic Mode! What might have been a sense of freedom any other time – was a sense of dismay today! I am preparing for 7 events in the coming two weeks – the first one less than a week away. There are presentations to put together, documents to review, emails to send, people to coordinate with and approximately a hundred things that need to fall into place. So this was definitely not the best time for this outage!!

The tools that help me multitask have gone on an unscheduled – unapproved leave!! Outlook had gone AWOL. I tried sending some attachement through my personal email only to remember that my office security measures recently prohibited that! And then there is Copilot. My trusted personal assistant, which has become quite indispensable over the last few months. It helps me summarise documents, organise thoughts, draft things, rework things and generally makes my working life considerably easier.

The only beacon of hope in this nightmare was Teams!! I did manage to have the one call I had today easily! Gave me some sense of normalty! And not just me – looks like people decided to use Teams very creatively – my brother in law’s colleagues would write emails and then do a Team’s call to show people what they wrote!! Clearly I am not the only loser missed their emails!

As the morning turned to afternoon, I was running out of things to do. And looking at outlook mournfully hoping for an email or two to trickle in was proving to be depressing. It was almost like waiting for a message from someone who has made it abundantly clear that they aren’t going to write back. The betrayal! The emptiness 🙁

So finally, I did the unthinkable. With no emails to check or respond to, no Copilot to instruct and no meaningful work that I could get done, I decided to go for lunch with my husband who is here on holiday for a few weeks.

Yes, an actual leisurely lunch. In the middle of a working day. Without my laptop. Without having to keep checking my phone. Without mentally wandering off to the next pending task while pretending to listen to my husband.

It was actually quite nice! Like two normal people we chatted without looking into our respective phones. We even managed to discuss some future plans. And our kids. We looked in each other’s eyes and smiled. The morning panic ebbed away slowly and some warmth seeped through my body.

And by the time I got home, Outlook had started getting back to normal. The inbox was not flooded, but there were enough emails that needed my attention! We were back online!

Isnt it funny – we complain so much about technology. Too many emails. Too many meetings. Too many messages. Too many demands on our time. We constantly wish we could switch off, take a break and have some time to ourselves.

And then, when technology actually forces us to do just that, we don’t quite know what to do with ourselves. I suppose the silver lining is that I got a leisurely lunch with my husband (who I was seeing after a couple of months), some uninterrupted family time and a brief reminder of what life was like before we became permanently attached to our laptops.

But let’s be honest. I am quite happy that Microsoft is back in action.

I have seven events to prepare for, after all. And my digital detox can wait.