I was talking to a friendly young lady on my bank’s telephone access line (a very convenient service, that). After she handled the transaction I needed, she told me in a cheerful voice that I’m entitled to the bank’s new SMS service, which she proceeded to describe.

This great new service would enable me to receive SMS messages right to my mobile phone whenever anything happened in my account: credits, debits, credit card transactions, and so on. Each would blare an alert on my belt. That, I was told, would save me a lot of effort checking what was going on! And, to add to my delight, this cornucopia of interruptions would be free of charge for the first three months!

I told her politely that I have a better deal for her: I’d be willing to pay the bank, if I had to, in order to bar this service from my already hectic life. After all, imagine the irony of me consulting at a client on how to reduce interruptions from SMS and other media in the workplace, and then when the client pays me I get an SMS interruption to announce the arrival of my fee. And, from the fourth month on, presumably another message to announce the debit of the fee I’d pay for this privilege…