In my previous life working in sales, I was shadowing an architectural specification representative in Chicago. As we paid tolls, parallel parked, and hauled cartons of samples all over the city, she said to me with a sigh, “It’s a lot of schlepping, and most of them have no idea.”
We worked in an old-school industry and were often the only women in the room. We had both been given the difficult task of trying to break into entirely new markets with unknown products, and I understood the weight of her frustration and exhaustion from repeatedly banging her head against a wall.
I think about her every time I’m hauling groceries from place to place.
It’s a lot of schlepping.
Or when I’m carrying an armful of dishes upstairs to the kitchen after working from home all day.
It’s a lot of schlepping.
Or when I’m uploading a picture from my phone to the Google Drive app, downloading it on my computer, uploading the heic file to Canva, downloading the picture as a png, and uploading it to LinkedIn.
It’s a lot of digital schlepping.
Digital Schlepping
I came up with digital schlepping to give name to the specific type of frustration we have when wading through the slop of our digital world.
digital schlepping:
/dijedl SHlepping/
(verb)
to experience the heavy mental burden of navigating the incompatibility and clumsiness of the digital world
It’s the way that new hardware is released at breakneck speeds to ensure that with each new software upgrade, the two will drift apart in compatibility and force you to purchase something new. I recently upgraded the software on my Mac and was told by Bill at the Apple store that my computer is classified as “obsolete” in the system and he was strictly forbidden from taking it in the back and working on it.
It’s having to design for a 4:5 ratio on Instagram after being 1:1 for all of eternity only for it to switch to 3:4 and still give you an error in Meta Business Suite. (Try uploading a 3:4 ratio photo in Meta Business Suite, it will force you to crop it to 4:5 or 1:1.)
It’s your iPhone switching from “jpg” files to “heic” files one day without you noticing until your pictures won’t upload to LinkedIn because the platform doesn’t support that file type.
After exploring the dark side of being a social media manager, I realized that one of my biggest frustrations stems from this mental burden. I love the work that I do for my clients and I love my clients, but the extra labor of drudging through this digital world is what gets me the most frustrated and tired at the end of the day.
Perhaps as a one-woman show, I feel the burden of digital schlepping more. I’m the IT department, not some man sitting in another office who doesn’t even want to help you anyways. It’s me who has to carry my Mac through the mall and into the Apple store on a Friday afternoon–I can’t just ask my manager to order me a new one. I’m the one searching for answers on YouTube to the random technical problems I encounter throughout my day.
This isn’t to say that I’m doing this all by myself without a support system. I treasure my fellow self-employed friends whom I look up to, my husband who has more patience with technology than I do, and my dog who forces me to take a walk every day. Their support keeps me sane.
The first step in managing our frustrations with the digital world is giving them a name, and I invite you to use mine: digital schlepping.
