Disconnected Dilberts

Workers of the world, unite. With wireless e-mail you have nothing to lose but your corporate servers.

Office jockeys: How many java runs do you make a day? Smoke breaks? How often do you “step out for a minute” to browse the CD listening stations at Virgin Megastore?

That many, huh? Well, rest assured, you're fooling no one. The Man knows all about it. If only you could access your corporate e-mail while you were slamming espressos, sucking your cancer sticks or dancing with yourself to the latest from Outkast.

You can, of course. Wireless e-mail is available on just about every mobile phone, but it's probably the least-used function on all of them. Why? Because most companies aren't progressive enough to sign up for a service that offers wireless corporate e-mail access.

It's not without a healthy dose of irony that I recognize how lucky I am to use an Internet-based e-mail service. It makes accessing e-mail via my mobile phone a breeze. It's sometimes unreliable, but what the heck? It's also free.

I'm not a resident of Cubicle City, so I don't suffer the injustices of corporate IT departments. But working from home I'm forced to use a paltry dial-up connection to get online. So a wireless express lane to my Yahoo Mail account beats spending several unproductive minutes dialing up. Only when I get an important message that I need to reply to at length — such as an inquiry from that pesky Enron sub-committee — do I waste time dialing up.

I'm also pretty mobile. I like to head down to the corner café with my laptop to write, en latte flagrante and free from the beckoning charms of Maury Povich. I'm not afraid to leave my Internet connection to do so because I can always check e-mail.

I may be an unusual case (so my friends tell me), but my day-to-day experience ports easily to other scenarios: I often spend several days at a time on the road, where I can check my e-mail wirelessly throughout the day rather than hiking back to my hotel room just to dial up on an already over-worked connection.

Shout outs to Sanyo, which makes the SCP-5000 handset for my Sprint PCS service. I've toyed around with a number of others and find the Sanyo the most user-friendly. It has a button that delivers me directly to the wireless Web. Other phones required me to scroll through a menu first. And with its eight-line text display, the Sanyo's color screen is unusually large for such a small phone.

Wireless e-mail is ready and willing, but corporations aren't. They must not realize how much better wireless-armed drones are at pretending they're getting work done. And if that's not a sign of a good corporation, what is?